Data from: Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal

Vision enables many animals to perform spatial reasoning from remote
locations. By viewing distant landmarks, animals recall spatial memories
and plan future trajectories. Although these spatial functions depend on
hippocampal place cells, the relationship between place cells and active
visual behavior is unknown. Here, we studied a highly visual animal, the
chickadee, in a behavior that required alternating between remote visual
search and spatial navigation. We leveraged the head-directed nature of
avian vision to track gaze in freely moving animals. We discovered a
profound link between place coding and gaze. Place cells activated not
only when the chickadee was in a specific location, but also when it
simply gazed at that location from a distance. Gaze coding was precisely
timed by fast, ballistic head movements called “head saccades”. On each
saccadic cycle, the hippocampus switched between encoding a prediction of
what the bird was about to see and a reaction to what it actually saw. The
temporal structure of these responses was coordinated by subclasses of
interneurons that fired at different phases of the saccade. We suggest
that place and gaze coding are components of a unified process by which
the hippocampus represents the location that is currently relevant to the
animal. This process allows the hippocampus to implement both local and
remote spatial functions. This dataset includes spike sorted data from all
cells in the paper, as well as behavioral data from the corresponding
sessions.