CNI Speaker Series: Stefano Fusi

Stefano Fusi
Center for Theoretical Neuroscience
Columbia University

Distributed coding of position in the dentate gyrus

Using calcium imaging we recorded the activity of hundreds of dentate gyrus (DG) cells simultaneously as mice explored an arena. The instantaneous position of mice can be decoded from the calcium traces with a precision that is comparable to the animal's body size. Ranking neurons based on their contribution to decoding accuracy revealed that many single neuron response properties are not predictive of the importance of a cell for encoding position. The total activity was one of the strongest predictors, significantly less important are spatial information and the features of the place fields (e.g. the number of fields). Destroying correlations between neurons while maintaining their spatial tuning properties significantly disrupted the ability to decode the position of the animal. Our analysis indicate that classical methods of analysis based on single cell response properties might be insufficient to characterize the neural code of position. Work done with F. Stefanini, M. Kheirbeck, L. Kushnir and R. Hen.


A pizza lunch will be served.