Topic: gaze saccades

The circuit mechanisms that transform sensory input into the observed firing patterns in the hippocampus are unclear. Like primates, birds almost exclusively depend on vision to navigate. However, birds primarily direct gaze using head saccades, rather than eye saccades, and gaze can therefore be readily measured during free movement. We leveraged these features to ask how visual input during navigational decisions is encoded by the hippocampus. We developed a system to estimate gaze in freely moving birds, and designed a task to behaviorally dissociate physical location (“place”) from viewed