[CTN] special CTN seminar: Dr. Francesco Battaglia, Wed Apr 3, 3.30pm in PAS 2464

[Matthijs van der Meer]

Francesco will be in Waterloo this Wednesday, and he has kindly agreed
to give a talk.

A physicist by training, his recent work not only includes experimental
work on hippocampal cell assemblies, but also theoretical contributions
on e.g. entropy estimation and spike-field coherence.

If you would like to meet with Francesco, please let me know!

-- Matt


Dr. Francesco Battaglia
Donders Centre for Neuroscience, Nijmegen, the Netherlands
http://www.battaglia.nl/

Wed 3rd April 2013
PAS 2464, 3.30pm

SENSORY-BASED TO MEMORY-BASED SPATIAL MAPS:
The role of CA1 NMDA receptors in hippocampal dynamics and spatial
representations

Place coding in the hippocampus requires flexible combinations of
sensory inputs with memory and self-motion information. We show that,
depending on the behavioral strategy spontaneously selected by the
animal on a complex (‘star’) maze, mouse CA1 hippocampal spatial
representations may be anchored to external landmarks, or reflect
memorized sequences of cell assemblies. These computational modalities
correspond to profoundly different CA1 dynamical states, with changes in
network oscillatory dynamics at theta, low-gamma, and high-gamma
frequencies, consistent with a shift from entorhinal to CA3 input
dominance on CA1 when switching from sensory-based to memory-based
spatial processing. This shift is disrupted in mice with a deletion of
NMDA receptors in CA1, paralleling impaired memory-based
representations. We suggest that changes in oscillatory dynamics are key
to the selection of behaviorally appropriate computations in the
hippocampus, and that control of these regimes is a major function of
NMDA receptors.