Talk Title:

Coordination of hippocampal codes for physical and visual space in food-caching birds 

Talk Abstract:

The black-capped chickadee stores and later retrieves individual pieces of food across its environment using hippocampus-dependent memory. These food-caching birds thus provide a model system for studying episodic-like memory in an experimentally-amenable small animal. Like primates, food-caching birds also depend heavily on vision to navigate. I will first describe our discovery of spatial representations in the avian hippocampus, suggesting a remarkable similarity in hippocampal circuit function between birds and mammals despite 300 million years of independent evolution. More recently, I developed a system to estimate gaze in freely moving birds, allowing us to behaviorally dissociate physical location from viewed location. I will present results using this system, which suggest that the hippocampus dynamically coordinates representations of physical and viewed locations during active vision. These codes are additionally modulated by expectation related to future goals. These studies lay a foundation for future investigation of how mnemonic and perceptual circuits interact to guide behavior more broadly.