Comparison of place field detection methods and their effect on place field stability and drift in mouse dCA1

Background Hippocampal place cells (PCs) undergo representational drift, i.e., a gradual change in their place fields despite unaltered behavior. While Ca2+ imaging enables long-term tracking of PC populations, distinct PC detection methods have been shown to yield different subpopulations of PCs, with only a few systematic comparisons between methods, especially in open arenas. New Method We provide an analysis protocol for one-photon PC data obtained during free foraging in two-dimensional arenas that allows us to compare two widely used PC detection methods, significance of spatial information (SI), and split-half correlation (SHC), and their effect on representational drift. The analysis is demonstrated on previously published Ca2+ data from dorsal CA1 of freely foraging mice, with cells tracked for 10 consecutive days. Results Both criteria, SI and SHC, yielded proportions of approx. 17% PCs with only 40% overlap. SI-identified PCs demonstrated higher stability, higher rate map correlations, and a slower rate of representational drift than SHC-PCs. Comparison with existing methods Previous studies comparing SI and SHC PC detection methods in Ca2+ data did not focus on either open field behavior or representational drift. Conclusion Our results indicate that the choice of PC detection method significantly affects the estimate of representational drift in Ca2+ imaging studies.