Porter, B., Schmidt, R. orcid.org/0000-0002-2474-3744 and Bilkey, D. (2018) Hippocampal place cell encoding of sloping terrain. Hippocampus, 28 (11). pp. 767-782. ISSN 1050-9631
Abstract
Effective navigation relies on knowledge of one’s environment. A challenge to effective navigation is accounting for the time and energy costs of routes. Irregular terrain in ecological environments poses a difficult navigational problem as organisms ought to avoid effortful slopes to minimize travel costs. Route planning and navigation have previously been shown to involve hippocampal place cells and their ability to encode and store information about an organism’s environment. However, little is known about how place cells may encode the slope of space and associated energy costs as experiments are traditionally carried out in flat, horizontal environments. We set out to investigate how dorsal-CA1 place cells in rats encode systematic changes to the slope of an environment by tilting a shuttle box from flat to 15° and 25° while minimizing external cue change. Overall, place cell encoding of tilted space was as robust as their encoding of flat ground as measured by traditional place cell metrics such as firing rates, spatial information, coherence, and field size. A large majority of place cells did, however, respond to slope by undergoing partial, complex remapping when the environment was shifted from one tilt angle to another. The propensity for place cells to remap did not, however, depend on the vertical distance the field shifted. Changes in slope also altered the temporal coding of information as measured by the rate of theta phase precession of place cell spikes, which decreased with increasing tilt angles. Together these observations indicate that place cells are sensitive to relatively small changes in terrain slope and that terrain slope may be an important source of information for organizing place cell ensembles. The terrain slope information encoded by place cells could be utilized by efferent regions to determine energetically advantageous routes to goal locations.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2018 The Authors. Hippocampus published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
Keywords: | Phase precession; place cells; three-dimensional (3D) space |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Science (Sheffield) > Department of Psychology (Sheffield) |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 18 May 2018 10:24 |
Last Modified: | 21 May 2019 00:40 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1002/hipo.22966 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Wiley |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1002/hipo.22966 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:131006 |
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