Topic: Single Unit Activity

Navigating towards goals in crowded spaces is a complex behavior that requires keeping track of relative positions of goals and obstacles. Animals can solve this by breaking down routes into subgoals - intermediate waypoints. It is not known how the brain represents subgoals, or how their representation differs from static spatial features of the environment. Building on work showing that mice use a subgoal strategy to escape to shelter, we placed mice in an arena divided in half by a barrier, with a shelter in the bottom half. The barrier leaves a gap on one side which mice learn to use as a

Recently, there has been an increase in interest in exploring the hypothesis that neural activity conveys information through precise spiking motifs. To investigate this phenomenon, several algorithms have been proposed to detect such motifs in Single Unit Activity recorded from populations of neurons. Based on the inversion of a generative model of raster plot synthesis, we present a novel detection model. This model derives an optimal detection procedure in the form of logistic regression combined with temporal convolution. Its differentiability allows for a supervised learning approach usin

The hippocampal formation is important for encoding, consolidation and retrieval of episodic memories. While integration of spatial information into episodic memories has been studied in great detail, how social information is encoded in the brain has received less attention. Emerging evidence suggests that the hippocampus area CA2 plays an essential role for social recognition memories, and previous studies show that silencing area CA2 impairs social recognition in mice. To determine how social, spatial and object information is computed in the different areas of the hippocampus, we recorded