Date of Completion

Spring 5-11-2020

Thesis Advisor(s)

Etan Markus

Honors Major

Biological Sciences

Disciplines

Other Neuroscience and Neurobiology | Psychology

Abstract

The hippocampus is an important brain structure involved in memory and navigation of both rats and humans. Neurons in the hippocampus can be “spatially” tuned, meaning they fire in specific physical locations. These spatially tuned cells are referred to as place cells. Collectively, they are thought to provide a map-like representation of the environment around us. If the environment is changed, some place cells can adjust by “remapping”, or altering their firing patterns. There are multiple sub-regions within the hippocampus. During experiments, cells were recorded simultaneously from the dorsal and ventral hippocampus of rats running on a track for food reward. Two spatial and two olfactory manipulations were made to the environment for two days each. Overall, our data confirm that complex spike cells generally have higher info content than interneurons in the hippocampus. In addition, our data suggests dorsal cells significantly remap in response to novel spatial manipulations and olfactory manipulations. Our data also shows that ventral cells did not significantly remap on the first day of all manipulations. However, ventral cells did significantly remap on the second day of spatial manipulations and had a trend suggesting they were close to significantly remapping on the second day of olfactory manipulations as well. Taken together, these data could provide insight into information content of different hippocampal cells as well as regional differences of hippocampal representations of novel environments and the persistence of their activity across sessions and days.

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