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Project

Hippocampal-prefrontal interactions underlying cognitive flexibility in spatial navigation

To answer the question of how the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex may underly the ability to flexibly switch between attentional sets and relearn spatial routes, we trained rats on a configuration of multi-arm mazes to follow spatial rules in order to receive food rewards. We recorded neural signals in the dorsal CA1 of the hippocampus, and across the dorsal-ventral axis in the medial prefrontal cortex while the animals were freely moving on the maze. Three projects were completed in order to tackle the question from different angles, focusing on position decoding in the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, characteristics of firing patterns of single cells in the medial prefrontal cortex and closed-loop manipulations of brain activity using optogenetics.

Date:1 Nov 2017 →  29 Sep 2023
Keywords:Hippocampus, mPFC, cognitive flexibility, electrophysiology, replay
Disciplines:Biological and physiological psychology
Project type:PhD project