The rat hippocampus contains cells that are characterized by location-specific firing. Previous work has shown that the angular position of hippocampal place cell firing fields is accurately controlled by the position of visual cues, suggesting that vision plays a important role in triggering place cell activity. However, a role for other types of information has also been suggested because pla...

The hippocampal formation is involved in navigation, and its neuronal activity exhibits a variety of spatial correlates (e.g., place cells, grid cells). The quantification of the information encoded by spikes has been standard procedure to identify which cells have spatial correlates. For place cells, most of the established metrics derive from Shannon's mutual information (Shannon, 1948), and ...

Hippocampal place cells fire selectively when a rat occupies a particular location. Under certain conditions, the cells briefly represent trajectories along locations away from the rat's current location. New results lend important insight into this phenomenon and demonstrate spatiotemporally coherent, cognitive representations that are independent of current sensory input.

As subjects perceive the sensory world, different stimuli elicit a number of neural representations. Here, a subjective distance between stimuli is defined, measuring the degree of similarity between the underlying representations. As an example, the subjective distance between different locations in space is calculated from the activity of rodent's hippocampal place cells and lateral septal ce...

One fundamental difference between information processing in the auditory pathway and automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems lies in the coding and processing of nerve-action potentials. Spike trains code amplitude information by means of a rate-code but most information is carried by precise spike timing. In this paper we focus on neurons located in the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN), whic...

The place theory proposed by Jeffress (1948) is still the dominant model of how the brain represents the movement of sensory stimuli between sensory receptors. According to the place theory, delays in signalling between neurons, dependent on the distances between them, compensate for time differences in the stimulation of sensory receptors. Hence the location of neurons, activated by the coinci...

The critical role of the hippocampus in episodic memory has long been recognized. In particular, the hippocampus is thought to encode spatial, temporal, and semantic relationships among objects and events (Eichenbaum and Cohen, 2014, Neuron 83:764). Numerous human and rodent studies have provided support for this hypothesis. First, the discovery of place cells, which exhibit changes in firing r...

Integration in the head-direction system is a computation by which horizontal angular head velocity signals from the vestibular nuclei are integrated to yield a neural representation of head direction. Usually, head direction is encoded in the form of a place code: neurons have a preferred head direction in which their firing is maximal [Blair and Sharp, 1995, Blair et al., 1998, Stackman and T...

Pyramidal neurons recorded from the rat hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, such as place and grid cells, have diverse receptive fields, which are either unimodal or multimodal. Spiking activity from these cells encodes information about the spatial position of a freely foraging rat. At fine timescales, a neuron's spike activity also depends significantly on its own spike history. However, due t...