A Dedicated Population for Reward Coding in the Hippocampus

The hippocampus plays a critical role in goal-directed navigation. Across different environments, however, hippocampal maps are randomized, making it unclear how goal locations could be encoded consistently. To address this question, we developed a virtual reality task with shifting reward contingen...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Neuron (Cambridge, Mass.) Vol. 99; no. 1; p. 179
Main Authors: Gauthier, Jeffrey L, Tank, David W
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: United States 11.07.2018
Subjects:
Animals
CA1 Region, Hippocampal - cytology
CA1 Region, Hippocampal - diagnostic imaging
CA1 Region, Hippocampal - physiology
Hippocampus - cytology
Hippocampus - diagnostic imaging
Hippocampus - physiology
Mice
Motivation
Neurons - cytology
Neurons - physiology
Optical Imaging
Reward
Spatial Navigation - physiology
Task Performance and Analysis
Virtual Reality
place fields
reward
CA1
navigation
virtual reality
hippocampus
place cells
subiculum
ISSN:1097-4199, 1097-4199
Online Access:Get more information
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Summary:The hippocampus plays a critical role in goal-directed navigation. Across different environments, however, hippocampal maps are randomized, making it unclear how goal locations could be encoded consistently. To address this question, we developed a virtual reality task with shifting reward contingencies to distinguish place versus reward encoding. In mice performing the task, large-scale recordings in CA1 and subiculum revealed a small, specialized cell population that was only active near reward yet whose activity could not be explained by sensory cues or stereotyped reward anticipation behavior. Across different virtual environments, most cells remapped randomly, but reward encoding consistently arose from a single pool of cells, suggesting that they formed a dedicated channel for reward. These observations represent a significant departure from the current understanding of CA1 as a relatively homogeneous ensemble without fixed coding properties and provide a new candidate for the cellular basis of goal memory in the hippocampus.
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ISSN:1097-4199
1097-4199
DOI:10.1016/j.neuron.2018.06.008