As with previous experiments that examined hippocampal firing during task delays (Gill et al., 2011; MacDonald et al., 2011; Pastalkova et al., 2008), at any one point during treadmill running, a subset of hippocampal neurons were firing and the subset of neurons changed in a regular sequence that repeated during every treadmill run. This sequential firing could underlie the ability of the hippocampus Selleckchem MS 275 to encode

temporal aspects of episodic memory, by serving as a time-based template upon which new memories are stored and later recalled. This is important for disambiguating memories that share spatial locations (Hasselmo, 2009, 2012). By systematically varying time and distance, we were also able to separate the influences of time and distance on firing and measure the extent to which each variable influenced firing. Our main finding is the prevalent observation of both cells that more

accurately encoded the distance the rat has run on the treadmill and cells that more accurately encoded the time the rat has spent on the treadmill. The observation of distance coding in this task indicates that hippocampal neurons can integrate the length FG4592 of a path even in the absence of visual cues usually associated with movement through space. Also, the presence of cells that signal distance indicates that these neurons are not driven entirely by network dynamics without the influence of either idiothetic or allothetic cues, as suggested by Pastalkova et al. (2008) (see also Itskov et al., 2011), as the neurons must be responding to the treadmill speed, or self-motion cues influenced by the treadmill speed, in order to encode distance. In addition, the observation of cells whose activity was significantly influenced by only time indicates that

these neurons are also not exclusively driven by path found integration (Etienne and Jeffery, 2004; McNaughton et al., 1996, 2006). Rather, in the present study where both of these dimensions are prominent, our results show that the hippocampus represents both the distance traveled and time elapsed simultaneously. Furthermore, a large fraction of hippocampal neurons combine information about these dimensions to varying extents, such that different neurons largely reflected distance or time and others equivalently reflected the combination of these dimensions. Due to the residual correlation between time elapsed and distance traveled, we cannot say with certainty whether those neurons that were influenced by both time elapsed and distance traveled were encoding both time and distance simultaneously or whether the hippocampus was shifting between types of representations (such as was demonstrated in Jezek et al., 2011).