Animal-to-Animal Variability in Hippocampal Remapping

Hippocampal place cells form a map of an animal’s environment. When the animal moves to a new environment, place field locations and firing rates change, a phenomenon known as remapping. Different animals can have different remapping responses to the same environments. This variability across animals in remapping behavior is not well understood. In this work, we analyzed electrophysiological recordings from Alme et al. (2014), in which five male rats were exposed to 11 different environments. To compare the hippocampal maps in two rooms, we computed average rate map correlation coefficients. We discovered that the heterogeneity in animals’ remapping behavior is structured: animals’ remapping behavior is consistent across a range of independent comparisons. Our findings highlight that remapping behavior between repeated environments depends on animal-specific factors.