A place cell is a type of pyramidal neuron in the hippocampus that modulates its activity when an animal enters a particular place in its environment. Download a dataset of neural recordings from place cells in the hippocampus of a rat that is moving along a linear track, obtained from Matt Wilson’s lab. Explore a lab activity in MATLAB to recover the animal’s trajectory from the neural activity, using multiple estimation techniques.

Video:

• Matt Wilson, Hippocampus, memory, & sleep: Part 1 (51:35)

Additional Resources:

• O’Keefe, J. (1976) Place units in the hippocampus of the freely moving rat. Experimental Neurology, 51:78-109
• Kiehn, O. & Forssberg, H. (2014) The brain’s navigational place and grid cell system (scientific background for the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine)
• Davidson, T. J., Kloosterman, F. & Wilson, M. A. (2009) Hippocampal replay of extended experience. Neuron 63(4):497-507.
• Zhang, K., Ginzburg, I., McNaughton, B. L. & Sejnowski, T. (1988) Interpreting neural population activity by reconstruction: Unified framework with application to hippocampal place cells. J. Neurophysiology 79:1017-1044.
• Download a MATLAB Live Script with code and data, to analyze the neural activity of place cells in the hippocampus of a rat that is moving along a linear track. The data was collected by Hector Penagos in Matt Wilson’s lab. In the MATLAB Live Script created by Daniel Zysman and Ellen Hildreth, the neural activity of place cells is used to decode the position of the rat on the track using two methods, a simple winner-take-all strategy and maximum likelihood estimate. (The MATLAB Live Script is only compatible with MATLAB 2016b and more recent versions.)