Current Biology
Volume 29, Issue 19, 7 October 2019, Pages 3177-3192.e3
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Article
Locomotor and Hippocampal Processing Converge in the Lateral Septum

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2019.07.089Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • Lateral septum (LS) firing is correlated with locomotor speed and acceleration

  • LS neurons modulate their firing during cue and reward throughout a conditioning task

  • Cue and/or reward cells are associated with HPC activity and movement cells are not

  • LS movement information and HPC-LS coordination may be used downstream by the VTA

Summary

The lateral septum (LS) has been implicated in anxiety and fear modulation and may regulate interactions between the hippocampus and regions, such as the VTA, that mediate goal-directed behavior. In this study, we simultaneously record from cells in the LS and the hippocampus during navigation and conditioning tasks. In the LS, we identify a speed and acceleration spiking code that does not map to states of anticipation or reward. Additionally, we identify an overlapping population of LS cells that change firing to cue and reward during conditioning. These cells display sharp wave ripple and theta modulation, spatial firing fields, and responses similar to the hippocampus during conditioning. These hippocampus-associated cells are not disproportionately speed or acceleration modulated, suggesting that these movement correlates are not hippocampally derived. Finally, we show that LS theta coordination is selectively enhanced in hippocampus-associated LS cells during navigation behavior that requires working memory. Taken together, these results suggest a role for the LS in transmitting spatial and contextual information, in concert with locomotor information, to downstream areas, such as the VTA, where value weighting may take place.

Keywords

movement
navigation
conditioning
theta rhythm
decoding
running speed
path integration
tetrode recording
VTA
memory

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