Author Type

Undergraduate Student

Date of Award

Spring 5-2-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

June 2026

College Granting Degree

Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Yingxue Wang

Abstract

The hippocampus is central to the formation of episodic memories, or memories of personally-experienced events. Episodic memories, in turn, are crucial for navigation along familiar pathways as they can encode information about both external sensory events and internal understandings of position and behavior. The contributions of individual cells in the hippocampus to episodic memory formation and recall during navigation, however, are not well-understood. We recorded the activity of hippocampal CA1 neurons as mice were trained on a particular navigation task which required running a specified distance on a treadmill and then licking on a lick port. Using gradient-boosted decision trees, we classified the quality of behavior during the task and predicted the firing activity of recorded neurons as a function of sensory and self-motion information. Our findings indicate that most hippocampal neurons were primarily tuned to velocity and the distance run on the treadmill rather than external sensory cues.

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