Experience-dependent firing rate remapping generates directional selectivity in hippocampal place cells
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When rodents engage in irregular foraging in an open-field environment, hippocampal principal cells exhibit place-specific firing that is statistically independent of the direction of traverse through the place field. When the path is restricted to a track, however, in-field rates differ substantially in opposite directions. Frequently, the representations of the track in the two directions are essentially orthogonal. We show that this directionally selective firing is not hard-wired, but develops through experience-dependent plasticity. During the rats' first pass in each direction, place fields were highly directionally symmetric, whereas over subsequent laps, the firing rates in the two directions gradually but substantially diverged. We conclude that, even on a restricted track, place cell firing is initially determined by allocentric position, and only later, the within-field firing rates change in response to differential sensory information or behavioral cues in the two directions. In agreement with previous data, place fields near local cues, such as textures on the track, developed less directionality than place fields on a uniform part of the track, possibly because the local cues reduced the net difference in sensory input at a given point. Directionality also developed in an open environment without physical restriction of the animal's path, when rats learned to run along a specified path. In this case, directionality developed later than on the running track, only after the rats began to run in a stereotyped manner. Although the average population firing rates exhibited little if any change over laps in either direction, the direction-specific firing rates in a given place field were up-or down-regulated with about equal probability and magnitude, which was independent in the two directions, suggesting some form of competitive mechanism (e.g., LTP/LTD) acting coherently on the set of synapses conveying external information to each cell.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".