Studying murine behaviour and extending the hippocampal place cell model to 3 dimensions (360G-Wellcome-207408_Z_17_Z)

In previous decades, studies focussing on hippocampal place cell activity have resorted to using 2-dimensional simulation models. I argue that such a paradigm proves to be insufficient when extending it to real-world, heavily 3D-biased, applications. As such, in this project, I propose an alternative approach to the study of place cells in which a rat’s neuronal activity is wirelessly monitored while it is allowed to freely explore a lattice maze in all directions of Cartesian space. Most importantly, I aim to show that receptive fields are of similar sizes in the horizontal and vertical directions; I also hypothesise that concatenating receptive fields (RFs) from several place cells will yield a layered organisation with inter-RF distances being larger in the x-z/y-z planes than the x-y plane. Incidentally, this study will also provide data which I hypothesise will confirm the horizontal bias model in murine behaviour proposed by Jovalekic et al. (2011).