The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) hosts many of the brain's circuit elements for spatial navigation and episodic memory, operations that require neural activity to be organized across long durations of experience. Whereas location is known to be encoded by spatially tuned cell types in this brain region, little is known about how the activity of entorhinal cells is tied together over time at behaviourally relevant time scales, in the second-to-minute regime. Here we show that MEC neuronal activity has the capacity to be organized into ultraslow oscillations, with periods ranging from tens of seconds to minutes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjects and landmarks are crucial for guiding navigation and must be integrated into the cognitive map of space. Studies of object coding in the hippocampus have primarily focused on activity of single cells. Here, we record simultaneously from large numbers of hippocampal CA1 neurons to determine how the presence of a salient object in the environment alters single-neuron and neural-population activity of the area.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFQuantifying uncertainty associated with our models is the only way we can express how much we know about any phenomenon. Incomplete consideration of model-based uncertainties can lead to overstated conclusions with real-world impacts in diverse spheres, including conservation, epidemiology, climate science, and policy. Despite these potentially damaging consequences, we still know little about how different fields quantify and report uncertainty.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Comput Neurosci
December 2016
Burst spike patterns are common in regions of the hippocampal formation such as the subiculum and medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). Neurons in these areas are immersed in extracellular electrical potential fluctuations often recorded as the local field potential (LFP). LFP rhythms within different frequency bands are linked to different behavioral states.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFront Neural Circuits
February 2016
Orientation selectivity is ubiquitous in the primary visual cortex (V1) of mammals. In cats and monkeys, V1 displays spatially ordered maps of orientation preference. Instead, in mice, squirrels, and rats, orientation selective neurons in V1 are not spatially organized, giving rise to a seemingly random pattern usually referred to as a salt-and-pepper layout.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe reliability of a spiking neuron depends on the frequency content of the driving input signal. Previous studies have shown that well above threshold, regularly firing neurons generate reliable responses when the input signal resonates with the firing frequency of the cell. Instead, well below threshold, reliable responses are obtained when the input frequency resonates with the subthreshold oscillations of the neuron.
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