Related Experiment Video
Updated: Sep 26, 2025
Implantation of Chronic Silicon Probes and Recording of Hippocampal Place Cells in an Enriched Treadmill Apparatus
Published on: October 11, 2017
Hippocampal place codes are gated by behavioral engagement
Noah L Pettit1, Xintong C Yuan1, Christopher D Harvey2
1Department of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Abstract:
As animals explore an environment, the hippocampus is thought to automatically form and maintain a place code by combining sensory and self-motion signals. Instead, we observed an extensive degradation of the place code when mice voluntarily disengaged from a virtual navigation task, remarkably even as they continued to traverse the identical environment. Internal states, therefore, can strongly gate spatial maps and reorganize hippocampal activity even without sensory and self-motion changes.
