Context-Dependent Spatial Representations in the Hippocampus using Place Cell Dendritic Computation

The hippocampus in rodents encodes physical space using place cells that show maximal firing in specific regions of space - their place fields. These place cells are reused across different contexts and environments with uncorrelated place fields. Though place fields are known to depend on distal sensory cues, even identical environments can have completely different place fields if the contexts are different. We propose a novel place cell network model for this feature using two frequently overlooked aspects of neural computation - dendritic morphology and the spatial co-location of spatiotemporally co-active afferent synapses - and show that these enable the reuse of place cells to encode different maps for environments with identical sensory cues.