Geeta Rao
Lab Manager
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Research Interests: Intermittent locomotion, exploration consisting of alternating bouts of forward progression and pauses, is a ubiquitously observed behavior. During the pauses in locomotion, rats engage in scanning behavior, consisting of lateral or vertical head movements, presumably to investigate environmental features. We have previously shown that increased neural activity during head scanning predicted the formation and potentiation of place fields on the next pass through that location (Monaco et. al, 2014.) This phenomenon may reflect single-trial encoding of non-spatial information onto a spatial framework, a hallmark of episodic memory. We plan to further characterize scan-related hippocampal place cell firing and field potentiation in hippocampal CA1 and CA3 subfields. We are also currently examining whether changes in scanning behavior and scan-related hippocampal cell firing may contribute to cognitive spatial deficits observed in old animals. Whether scan potentiation of place fields in old animals occurs is a particularly intriguing question that we will be addressing in the near future with further data acquisition. Whether firing during scanning behavior signals particularly salient locations in the environment, such as reward encounters, is a further avenue of investigation.