Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Case Study: Effects Of Ultrasonic Vocalizations On Rat Behavior And Place Cell Remapping In The Hippocampus, Qingli Hu

Honors Scholar Theses

Spatial information is known to be encoded in the hippocampus, and small changes in the environment can alter the way that it is represented by our hippocampal place cells in a process called remapping. Hearing is an important sense that can be used to orient ourselves and react to the environment accordingly. In this case study, a rat model is used to test the effects of emotional auditory stimuli, behaviorally significant ultrasonic vocalizations (USVs) (50 kHz, emitted during play; 22 kHz, emitted during danger), on rat behavior on a linear track and place cell remapping in the hippocampus. Behaviorally, it …

Effects Of Hippocampal Inactivation With Dreadds On Water Maze Performance, Julia Levin

Honors Scholar Theses

The hippocampus is an elongated brain structure related to processing episodic memory and spatial navigation. The dorsal hippocampus plays an important role in spatial tasks (Lee & Kesner, 2003), while the ventral hippocampus is known to be involved with emotion (Fanselow & Dong, 2010). Previous work in our lab has shown that the dorsal and ventral sections within the same hemisphere work together during navigation (Lee et al., 2019). The lab is currently determining how activity in the dorsal hippocampus impacts place cell firing in the ventral hippocampus. To accomplish this the dorsal hippocampus will be inactivated using Designer Receptors …

Assessing Rat Behavioral Response To Novelty, Neha Mathew

Honors Scholar Theses

The hippocampus is the part of the brain that is involved in memory and navigation. Neurons in the hippocampus, known as place cells, fire in specific locations within this region of the brain as the subject navigates through their environment. As these cells fire, they create a map-like representation of this environment. However if the environment is altered in any way, the place cell firing pattern is adjusted to incorporate this new information. This adjustment will inevitably cause subjects to take more time to complete their task. The goal of our testing was to assess how various manipulations, both spatial …

Remapping Of Place Cells In The Dorsal And Ventral Hippocampus In Response To Environmental Change, Aditi Anam

Honors Scholar Theses

The hippocampus is an important brain structure involved in memory and navigation of both rats and humans. Neurons in the hippocampus can be “spatially” tuned, meaning they fire in specific physical locations. These spatially tuned cells are referred to as place cells. Collectively, they are thought to provide a map-like representation of the environment around us. If the environment is changed, some place cells can adjust by “remapping”, or altering their firing patterns. There are multiple sub-regions within the hippocampus. During experiments, cells were recorded simultaneously from the dorsal and ventral hippocampus of rats running on a track for food …

Spike Field Coherence (Sfc) For Ripples In Rat Hippocampus, Pranav Singla

Honors Scholar Theses

The aim of this project was to determine coherence between two types of neural recordings which can be obtained from the rat hippocampus: spikes and local field potentials. Extracellular recording makes it possible to determine spiking activity from individual neurons in the vicinity of the recording electrode. Local field potential recording gives a combined activity of many neurons (thousands) at once to determine an overall picture of the coordination of the cells in real time. Here we examine the relationship between these two signals, focusing on place cells which spike at their maximal rate only at certain positions in physical …

Cooperation & Competition Between Navigation Systems In The Rat Brain: The Role Of The Hippocampus And Striatum During A Dissociative Maze Task, Benjamin Gruenbaum

Honors Scholar Theses

While many tend to think of memory systems in the brain as a single process, in reality several experiments have supported multiple dissociations of different forms of learning, such as spatial learning and response learning. In both humans and rats, the hippocampus has long been shown to be specialized in the storage of spatial and contextual memory whereas the striatum is associated with motor responses and habitual behaviors.

Previous studies have examined how damage to hippocampus or striatum has affected the acquisition of either a spatial or response navigation task. However even in a very familiar environment organisms must continuously …