Topic: place field size

Neurons in the rodent hippocampus appear to encode the position of the animal in physical space during movement. Individual ``place cells'' fire in restricted sub-regions of an environment, a feature often taken as evidence that the hippocampus encodes a map of space that subserves navigation. But these same neurons exhibit complex responses to many other variables that defy explanation by position alone, and the hippocampus is known to be more broadly critical for memory formation. Here we elaborate and test a theory of hippocampal coding which produces place cells as a general consequence of