A time-dependent analysis of spatial information encoding in the rat hippocampus

Abstract The place fields of rat hippocampal pyramidal cells evolve over time as the animal moves through its environment. To study the nature of this evolution we use an inhomogeneous gamma probability model and analyze the properties of place cell spike trains in non-overlapping windows. Although the locations and heights of the fields evolve over time for 27 of the 35 place cells studied, the temporal parameter was essentially unchanged. This result suggests that adaptive estimation methods may be useful to characterize the dynamics of hippocampal place cells for behavioral tasks executed in novel and non-novel environments.