Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. From now until the launch of Oxford Events, new events cannot be published or edited on OxTalks while all existing records are migrated to the new platform. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period.
From 16th, Oxford Events will launch on a new website: events.ox.ac.uk, and event submissions will resume. You will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
Recordings of neurons in cortical structures in behaving rodents show responses relevant to encoding of space and time for episodic memory and goal directed behaviour. Spatial location is coded by grid cells in entorhinal cortex and place cells in hippocampus (O’Keefe, 1976; Hafting et al., 2005). Grid cells and place cells can also code temporal intervals in a behavioural task, firing at specific time intervals or running distances when a rat runs on a treadmill (Kraus et al., 2013; 2015; Mau et al., 2018). Modeling shows that coding as time cells may arise from exponential decay of neural activity on multiple time scales (Liu et al., 2019). Coding of space could involve both path integration and transformation of sensory input. Coding of location by path integration could involve coding of running speed (Hinman et al., 2016). Inactivation of input from the medial septum impairs the spatial selectivity of grid cells suggesting rhythmic coding of running speed is essential to grid cell firing (Brandon et al., 2011). In addition, transformation of sensory input may be more important for computing location. Recent data from our lab shows coding of environmental boundaries in egocentric coordinates (Hinman et al., 2019; Alexander et al., 2020) that could be combined with head direction to generate allocentric coding of boundaries and spatial location (Bicanski and Burgess, 2018). These different neural mechanisms could mediate the coding of time and spatial location for episodic memory and goal-directed behaviour.
