Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: http://hdl.handle.net/1893/25847
Appears in Collections:Psychology Journal Articles
Peer Review Status: Refereed
Title: Lesions of the head direction cell system increase hippocampal place field repetition
Author(s): Harland, Bruce
Grieves, Roderick
Bett, David
Stentiford, Rachael
Wood, Emma R
Dudchenko, Paul
Contact Email: p.a.dudchenko@stir.ac.uk
Keywords: place cells
hippocampus
head direction cells
navigation
Issue Date: 11-Sep-2017
Date Deposited: 8-Aug-2017
Citation: Harland B, Grieves R, Bett D, Stentiford R, Wood ER & Dudchenko P (2017) Lesions of the head direction cell system increase hippocampal place field repetition. Current Biology, 27 (11), pp. 2706-2712.e2. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2017.07.071
Abstract: A central tenet of systems neuroscience is that the mammalian hippocampus provides a cognitive map of the environment. This view is supported by the finding of place cells, neurons whose firing is tuned to specific locations in an animal’s environment, within this brain region. Recent work, however, has shown that these cells repeat their firing fields across visually identical maze compartments [1,2]. This repetition is not observed if these compartments face different directions, suggesting that place cells use a directional input to differentiate otherwise similar local environments [3,4]. A clear candidate for this input is the head direction cell system. To test this, we disrupted the head direction cell system by lesioning the lateral mammillary nuclei, and then recorded place cells as rats explored multiple, connected compartments, oriented in the same or in different directions. As shown previously, we found that place cells in control animals exhibited repeated fields in compartments arranged in parallel, but not in compartments facing different directions. In contrast, the place cells of animals with lesions of the head direction cell system exhibited repeating fields in both conditions. Thus, directional information provided by the head direction cell system appears essential for the angular disambiguation by place cells of visually identical compartments.
DOI Link: 10.1016/j.cub.2017.07.071
Rights: This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
Licence URL(s): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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