2. Academic Validation
  3. Integration and competition between space and time in the hippocampus

Integration and competition between space and time in the hippocampus

  • Neuron. 2024 Nov 6;112(21):3651-3664.e8. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.08.007.
Shijie Chen 1,  Ning Cheng 2,  Xiaojing Chen 3,  Cheng Wang 4
Affiliations

Affiliations

  • 1 Brain Research Centre, Department of Neuroscience, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China.
  • 2 Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Precision Diagnosis and Treatment of Depression, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China.
  • 3 Brain Research Centre, Department of Neuroscience, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China. Electronic address: [email protected].
  • 4 Shenzhen Key Laboratory of Precision Diagnosis and Treatment of Depression, Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China; CAS Key Laboratory of Brain Connectome and Manipulation, The Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China; Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Brain Connectome and Behavior, The Brain Cognition and Brain Disease Institute, Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenzhen 518055, China; Key Laboratory of Brain Cognition and Brain-inspired Intelligence Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai 200031, China. Electronic address: [email protected].
PMID: 39241779 DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2024.08.007
Abstract

Episodic memory is organized in both spatial and temporal contexts. The hippocampus is crucial for episodic memory and has been demonstrated to encode spatial and temporal information. However, how the representations of space and time interact in the hippocampal memory system is still unclear. Here, we recorded the activity of hippocampal CA1 neurons in mice in a variety of one-dimensional navigation tasks while systematically varying the speed of the Animals. For all tasks, we found neurons simultaneously represented space and elapsed time. There was a negative correlation between the preferred space and lap duration, e.g., the preferred spatial position shifted more toward the origin when the lap duration became longer. A similar relationship between the preferred time and traveled distance was also observed. The results strongly suggest a competitive and integrated representation of space-time by single hippocampal neurons, which may provide the neural basis for spatiotemporal contexts.

Keywords

episodic memory; navigation; place cell; spatiotemporal; time cell.

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