The Journal of Neuroscience, May 1, 2002, 22(9):3817-3830
Contrasting Patterns of Receptive Field Plasticity in the
Hippocampus and the Entorhinal Cortex: An Adaptive Filtering
Approach
Loren M.
Frank1,
Uri T.
Eden1,
Victor
Solo2,
Matthew A.
Wilson3, and
Emery N.
Brown1
1 Neuroscience Statistics Research Laboratory,
Department of Anesthesia and Critical Care, Massachusetts General
Hospital and Harvard University/Massachusetts Institute of Technology
(MIT) Division of Health Sciences and Technology, Boston, Massachusetts
02114, 2 School of Electrical Engineering and
Telecommunications, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia,
and 3 Center for Learning and Memory, RIKEN/MIT
Neuroscience Research Center and Department of Brain and Cognitive
Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02139
Neural receptive fields are frequently plastic: a neural response
to a stimulus can change over time as a result of experience. We
developed an adaptive point process filtering algorithm that allowed us
to estimate the dynamics of both the spatial receptive field (spatial
intensity function) and the interspike interval structure (temporal
intensity function) of neural spike trains on a millisecond time scale
without binning over time or space. We applied this algorithm to both
simulated data and recordings of putative excitatory neurons from the
CA1 region of the hippocampus and the deep layers of the entorhinal
cortex (EC) of awake, behaving rats. Our simulation results demonstrate
that the algorithm accurately tracks simultaneous changes in the
spatial and temporal structure of the spike train. When we applied the
algorithm to experimental data, we found consistent patterns of
plasticity in the spatial and temporal intensity functions of both CA1
and deep EC neurons. These patterns tended to be opposite in sign, in
that the spatial intensity functions of CA1 neurons showed a consistent
increase over time, whereas those of deep EC neurons tended to
decrease, and the temporal intensity functions of CA1 neurons showed a
consistent increase only in the "theta" (75-150 msec) region,
whereas those of deep EC neurons decreased in the region between 20 and
75 msec. In addition, the minority of deep EC neurons whose spatial
intensity functions increased in area over time fired in a
significantly more spatially specific manner than non-increasing deep
EC neurons. We hypothesize that this subset of deep EC neurons may
receive more direct input from CA1 and may be part of a neural circuit that transmits information about the animal's location to the neocortex.
Key words:
hippocampus; CA1; entorhinal cortex; plasticity; receptive field; adaptive filtering; place field; spatial; coding
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