V-102 | Hippocampal neuronal activity during spatial navigation of alternate routes to a unique goal.

Neural Circuits and Systems Neuroscience
Author: Natalia Soldi | Email: natalia.soldi@gmail.com

Natalia Soldi^1°, Emilio Kropff^2°,Alejandro F. Schinder^1°, Verónica C. Piatti^1°

^1° Laboratorio de Plasticidad Neuronal – Fundación Instituto Leloir – Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires (IIBBA)- CONICET
^2° Laboratorio de Fisiología y Algoritmos del Cerebro – Fundación Instituto Leloir – Instituto de Investigaciones Bioquímicas de Buenos Aires (IIBBA)- CONICET

Memories are necessary for planning and successful goal accomplishment. The hippocampus is critical for declarative memories, in addition to spatial navigation. In a familiar environment, how animals use their memories to infer new routes to a reward remains unknown. Our work showed that mice could efficiently solve new routes to a known reward position in the crossword maze in only one trial, once the task becomes familiarized. This result indicates that mice are using previously acquired knowledge to predict a detour to the same goal location. It has been shown that hippocampal cells can be reactivated during population emergent phenomena, predicting new trajectories to the goal position. Therefore, we hypothesize that there might be a controlled balance of excitation and inhibition of the hippocampal cells encoding different routes to a unique goal in a daily task. Chronic microdrives were implanted in mice to record hippocampal single units and neuronal population dynamics, to study neuronal activity promoting cognitive flexibility while mice perform this task. These experiments are currently being analyzed. We speculate that neuronal ensembles encoding the first rewarded route might become inhibited to give rise to new activity patterns encoding new detour paths to the goal.