Topic: hippocampal place codes

In addition to maintaining a healthy body, physical activity benefits the brain, improving memory and cognition. While some of the physiological effects of voluntary exercise on the brain are known (e.g., increased hippocampal neurogenesis), little is known about its effects on the neural code. Using longitudinal Ca2+ imaging in freely behaving mice and tracking the same neurons over weeks, we studied how voluntary exercise affects the quality and long-term stability of hippocampal place codes. In addition to increasing neurogenesis, we found that running accelerated the emergence of spatial c

Long-term potentiation (LTP) is thought to be a key plasticity mechanism underlying the formation and maintenance of hippocampal place codes. It is unclear, however, which properties of these neural codes are inherited from upstream processing and which are learned through plasticity. To disentangle these influences on place codes, we utilized a method for abolishing LTP specifically in hippocampal region CA1 of the adult mouse without affecting basal synaptic processing: conditional genetic deletion of a necessary component of the postsynaptic membrane fusion machinery, Syntaxin3 (Stx3). Surp

The brain navigates mazes using the entorhinal grid and hippocampal place codes. While specific grid codes can represent maze structures independent of behavioral policy, little is known about how these task structure-specific grid codes generalize to novel tasks requiring different structures and policies. Reinforcement learning algorithms typically employ policy-biased representations, yet this approach lacks biological plausibility since it requires multiple distinct representations for task completion. To address these limitations, we propose topology-aware grid coding (TAG), a novel compu