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

The place fields of rat hippocampal pyramidal cells evolve over time as the animal moves through its environment. To study the nature of this evolutio n we use an inhomogeneous gamma probability model and analyze the propertie s of place cell spike trains in nonoverlapping windows. Although the locati ons and heights of the fields evolve over time for 27 of the 35 place cells studied, the temporal parameter was essentially unchanged. This result sug gests that adaptive estimation methods may be useful to characterize the dy namics of hippocampal place cells for behavioral tasks executed in novel an d non-novel environments. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserve d.