Long-term effects of permanent vestibular lesions on hippocampal spatial firing

The hippocampus is thought to be important for spatial representation processes that depend on the integration of both self-movement and allocentric cues. The vestibular system is a particularly important source of self-movement information that may contribute to this spatial representation. To test the hypothesis that the vestibular system provides self-movement information to the hippocampus, rats were given either a bilateral labyrinthectomy (n = 6) or a sham surgery (n = 6), and at least 60 d after surgery hippocampal CA1 neurons were recorded extracellularly while the animals foraged freely in an open arena. Recorded cells were classified as complex spiking (n = 80) or noncomplex spiking (n = 33) neurons, and their spatial firing fields (place fields) were examined. The most striking effect of the lesion was that it appeared to completely abolish location-related firing. The results of this and previous studies provide converging evidence demonstrating that vestibular information is processed by the hippocampus. The disruption of the vestibular input to the hippocampus may interfere with the reconciliation of internal self-movement signals with the changes to the external sensory inputs that occur as a result of that movement. This would disrupt the ability of the animal to integrate allocentric and egocentric information into a coherent representation of space.