Distributed coding of space and valence in the medial temporal lobe

The hippocampus has been associated with spatial information processing (OKeefe, 1976). However, it is also not clear whether such ensemble coding of spatial information extends to other brain regions in the medial temporal lobe. Hence, this study uses various classification techniques to attempt to decode spatial and valence information utilizing publicly available rodent single-unit data (Girardeau et al., 2017). We found that the spatial information is encoded sparsely and distributed among many neurons in the hippocampus. Additionally we found that both spatial and valence information could be decoded in the hippocampus, the amygdala, and the piriform cortex. We also compared the strengths and weaknesses of four different classifiers (LDA, KNN, SVM, NB) theoretically and in practice with this dataset.