A 3 min Vm trace during 3 successive CCW laps (Figure 2E) shows that each pass through the place field was accompanied by high AP firing rates as well as a clear subthreshold depolarization under that spiking (A.K. Lee et al., 2008, Soc. Neurosci., abstract [690.22]; Harvey et al., 2009). The sustained nature of these depolarizations suggests that spatially tuned spiking is not simply due to a short timescale coincidence detection mechanism. Some (Figure 2E, trace 1), but not all (trace 2), passes revealed spiking associated

with a series of large (to ∼−25 mV), long-lasting (∼100 ms) depolarizations (Kandel and Spencer, 1961, Wong and Prince, 1978, Traub and Llinás, 1979 and Takahashi and Magee, 2009) occurring rhythmically at ∼4–5 Hz (theta frequency). Figure 3 shows an intracellularly selleck chemical recorded silent cell that fired very few spikes in the maze and did not have a place field in either direction (Figures 3A–3D). CHIR-99021 mw CCW direction spiking occurred mostly during 1 lap (Figure 3C) and thus did not satisfy the consistency criterion for place fields (Experimental Procedures). An ∼3 min trace shows that the Vm was very flat as the animal moved around the maze (here ∼1.5 CW laps) (Figure 3E). An expanded trace (Figure 3E, above right) reveals ∼5 Hz, ∼5–10 mV subthreshold fluctuations. We estimated the net input into the

cell as seen at the soma as a function of the animal’s location. This was done for each direction of each cell as follows. We first removed all APs and any parts of the Vm trace isothipendyl directly attributable to the spikes themselves, i.e., parts representing spike-associated regenerative and/or other intrinsic processes at the soma as distinct from the inputs that triggered the spikes (see Figures S1A–S1C available online; Experimental

Procedures). This included removing (1) spike after-depolarizations (ADPs), which can be >5 mV and last for >20 ms for single APs and can accumulate for successive APs (Figures S1A and S1B; Kandel and Spencer, 1961, Wong and Prince, 1978, Traub and Llinás, 1979 and Jensen et al., 1996), and (2) the entirety of the slow, large, putatively calcium-based depolarizations that often follow a burst of APs, which can be >25 mV and last for >50 ms (Figure S1C; Kandel and Spencer, 1961, Wong and Prince, 1978 and Traub and Llinás, 1979). Then the remaining Vm trace was linearly interpolated across the gaps (Figures S1A–S1C) and the mean of the resulting trace as a function of location computed (Figure 4A, black). While the classical, i.e., mean spiking rate, place field (Figure 4A, red) represents the output of the cell, this mean “subthreshold field” reflects the spatially-modulated, net input into the cell’s soma. We determined the AP threshold of each cell as follows. The threshold for individual APs varies, especially (1) within a burst, rising with successive APs (Figure S1B; Kandel and Spencer, 1961), (2) during longer periods of depolarized Vm (e.g.