Abstract
The hippocampus is a critical component of a mammalian spatial navigation system, with the firing sequences of hippocampal place cells during sleep or immobility constituting a “replay” of an animal's past trajectories. A novel spatial navigation task recently revealed that such “replay” sequences of place fields can also prospectively map onto imminent new paths to a goal that occupies a stable location during each session. It was hypothesized that such “prospective replay” sequences may play a causal role in goal-directed navigation. In the present study, we query this putative causal role in finding only minimal effects of muscimol-induced inactivation of the dorsal and intermediate hippocampus on the same spatial navigation task. The concentration of muscimol used demonstrably inhibited hippocampal cell firing in vivo and caused a severe deficit in a hippocampal-dependent “episodic-like” spatial memory task in a watermaze. These findings call into question whether “prospective replay” of an imminent and direct path is actually necessary for its execution in certain navigational tasks.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Journal | Hippocampus |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages (from-to) | 769-786 |
| Number of pages | 18 |
| ISSN | 1050-9631 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Jun 2023 |
Keywords
- electrophysiology
- hippocampus
- pharmacology
- spatial learning
- spatial navigation