NeuropharmacologyPositional firing properties of postrhinal cortex neurons
Section snippets
Subjects
Subjects were four male Long-Evans rats (290–360 g, 2–5 months old) from Charles River Laboratory, Portage, MI, USA. Animals were housed individually and kept on a 12-h light/dark cycle. Animals had ad libitum access to food, but water access other than behavioral rewards during training was limited to 1 h per day for the duration of the experiment. All methods for handling research animals were according to approved IACUC and AAALAC guidelines. Research procedures were designed to minimize
Histology and behavior
Implant placement was evaluated for each subject in Nissl-stained coronal sections. In three out of the four rats, implants were located in anterior POR, which was the intended anatomical location (Fig. 2A, C, left). In the fourth rat, however, the electrode was located in an area slightly anterior to the POR, in lateral visual association cortex (VISL) according to Swanson (Swanson, 1998), (Fig. 2B, C, right). Because of this difference in placement, the recordings from the fourth rat
Discussion
The POR is reciprocally connected with the medial entorhinal cortex (Burwell and Amaral, 1998b), the hippocampus, and the subiculum (Naber et al., 1997). Cells with spatial firing correlates have been identified in each of these regions. This study examined whether cells in the POR also display spatial firing properties. Because the POR is interconnected with the hippocampus, it might be expected that POR cells exhibiting positional firing correlates would show the same properties as place
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by an NSF Career Award (IBN 9875792) to RDB and a Brown University Undergraduate Research and Teaching Fellowship to D.M.H.
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