Rapid tuning dynamics of CA1 place codes in one-and two- dimensional free exploration tasks

The emergence of neuronal specializations is the key question in modern neuroscience. In our previous study we estimated the basic parameters of the emergence of spatial representations (place fields) of a novel one-dimensional environment in mice during a free navigating task. However, in one-dimensional environments place fields may show direction specificity which observation was obscured by arbitrariness of animals trajectory. Here we expanded our approach onto a two-dimensional environment with a complex topology and compared the properties of the emergence of place fields such as selectivity score, tuning latency and the amount of “instant” place fields with our previous results. As expected, all basic parameters in 2D environment indicated rapid dynamics of place field tuning, similar to 1D case, including gradual decreasing of the tuning latency of place fields within familiarization to a novel environment and notable (11%) amount of “instant” place fields.