摘要:
In the present dissertation we studied the activity of place cells that encode the loca- tion of rodents during navigation and set up a model that achieves the determination of distances from places that the animal has previously visited. Regarding place cell activity, dendritic long term integration of inputs and the mech- anism of rate and phase code generation was studied in detail. By numerical sim- ulations of a conductance-based two-compartmental hippocampal pyramidal cell model we showed that: Periodic dendritic spiking integrates inputs by shifting the phase relative to an external oscillation and this generates the phase code. The number of somatic action potentials triggered by the dendritic spike depends on the in- stantaneous level of somatic depolarization, which results in rate coded firing of place cells. This mechanism resulted in firing patterns that closely matched experimental data from hippocampal place cells of freely behaving rats. After the cessation of increased input in the place field, free-running phase shift drives dendritic spiking back to the stable baseline firing at which den- dritic spikes they can not evoke somatic firing. This free-running phase shift is independent from the running speed of the animal therefore correlation be- tween firing phase and position of the animal is smaller in the second half of the place field than in the first half. Somatic input is proportional to the running speed of the animal and modu- lates the firing rate of the cell while leaving firing phases relatively unaffected. Therefore, faster runs through the same place field are associated with higher firing rates while the firing phase position relationship do not show any sys- tematic changes. This results in a specific decoupling of the rate and phase code of place cells. We showed that the time-constant of the dendritic integration process is practically infinite for input intensities above a threshold and can be still several hundred mil- liseconds