Neuroscience: What, where, and how wonderful?
Kaueˆ Machado Costa and Geoffrey Schoenbaum
 
Differential encoding of place value between the dorsal and intermediate hippocampus

Seung-Woo Jin1 and Inah Lee1,2,*

It is widely held that the hippocampus provides a cognitive map in which event-related information such as an object, location, and their significance is organized. However, how an organism’s motivational experience is coded in the hippocampus is mostly unknown. Here, we investigated whether the dorsal and intermediate regions of the hippocampus are differentially involved in representing changes in the motivational significance of a place. To investigate this, rats were run in tasks in which various rewards with different degrees of palatability were associated with the same locations while single units were simultaneously recorded along the dorsoventral axis of the hippocampus. Place cells in the intermediate hippocampus remapped immediately after motivational significance decreased and shifted their fields dynamically toward high-value locations. In contrast, place cells in the dorsal hippocampus were mostly unresponsive to the same manipulations. Our findings suggest that the motivational significance of place is uniquely coded in the intermediate hippocampus in goal- directed tasks