David Bilkey

Department of Psychology, University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand

Place and Movement Representation in the Hippocampus

The mammalian hippocampus appears to play an important role in spatial cognition. Lesions of the hippocampus disrupt spatial tasks and a high proportion of hippocampal pyramidal neurons (place cells) respond selectively when an animal is in a particular location within the environment (place field). This place cell activity is usually interpreted as being part of a neural representation of local space. We are interested in the question of how this "place representation" is constructed. Neurons in adjacent structures such as the postsubiculum and the perirhinal cortex appear to encode information that corresponds to the animal's head direction, and to the identity of various stimuli in the environment, respectively. Our recent work investigates how this latter information might be used to construct a representation of location.

This page was last updated on 16 Feb 2001.

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