Relationship between change of movement direction and activity of hippocampal place cells.

Hippocampal neurons which increase their activity when the rat passes through a certain position in the environment are called place cells. This paper describes the relationship between their temporal firing patterns and the behavior of the rat with the aim of characterizing the information they encode. The place field was identified in a circular open field during locomotion rewarded by intracranial self-stimulation of lateral hypothalamus. Detailed analysis of temporal firing patterns shows a correlation between changes in the orientation of movement trajectory and occurrence of the last firing of the burst trains emitted during passage of the animal through the place field. This suggests that some hippocampal neurons may encode the spatial information about the orientation changes in the place field.