Thesis defense Matteo Guardamagna (Donders series 586)

13 December 2022

Promotors: prof. dr. F. Battaglia, prof. dr. P. Tiesinga
Co-promotor: dr. F. Stella

Temporal coding dynamics in the CA1 region of the hippocampus

The work presented in this thesis explores how neural activity is organized in time in the hippocampus, a brain structure considered to play a key role in navigation and memory. By developing a new technology and using modern analytical approaches, we provide one of the broadest and most comprehensive pictures of the temporal structure of hippocampal activity. We reveal the highly heterogeneous character of CA1 computations, opening a new picture in which hippocampal information encoding shows a much greater flexibility than what previously accounted for. We obtain mechanistic insights into the ability of CA1's neurons to merge and compare incoming inputs to generate parallel information-rich representations to pass to the rest of the cortex. These results may inform new theories and computational models on memory formation in the brain.