Prefrontal cortex focally modulates hippocampal place cell firing patterns

Previous work shows that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) cells exhibit spatio-selective activity at a goal location when rats are trained in a goal-oriented navigation task. Damaging the ventral and intermediate hippocampal regions severely disrupts both mPFC goal firing and behavioral performance i...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Journal of neuroscience 2013-02, Vol.33 (8), p.3443-3451
Main Authors: Hok, Vincent, Chah, Ehsan, Save, Etienne, Poucet, Bruno
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Action Potentials - physiology
Animals
Cognitive science
Hippocampus - cytology
Hippocampus - physiology
Male
Neural Pathways - physiology
Neurons - physiology
Neuroscience
Prefrontal Cortex - cytology
Prefrontal Cortex - physiology
Rats
Rats, Long-Evans
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Summary:Previous work shows that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) cells exhibit spatio-selective activity at a goal location when rats are trained in a goal-oriented navigation task. Damaging the ventral and intermediate hippocampal regions severely disrupts both mPFC goal firing and behavioral performance in the same task. Additionally, hippocampal place cells tend to develop a secondary place field at the goal location, suggesting that goal locations can be encoded by local changes in firing rate, within an otherwise stable spatial representation. Therefore, it has been suggested that the coordinated activity of a large fraction of hippocampal cells at the goal location may interact with the mPFC to compute accurate planning trajectories, relying on both precise location-specific firing of place cells and the coarse-coded, goal-trajectory planning function of the prefrontal cortex. To test this hypothesis, we inactivated the mPFC and recorded hippocampal place cell activity while animals were performing the navigation task. The results show that post-training inactivation of the prefrontal cortex does not affect behavioral performance, suggesting that this structure is no longer required when animals are overtrained. The goal-related activity of place cells was not affected at either single unit or local field potential level. Conversely, profound modifications of place cell firing variability (overdispersion) were observed after suppression of prefrontal input, suggesting a possible mechanism underlying behavioral flexibility.
ISSN:0270-6474
1529-2401
1529-2401
DOI:10.1523/jneurosci.3427-12.2013