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 s..., , # Data from: Remote activation of place codes by gaze in a highly visual animal

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.tqjq2bw9n](10.5061/dryad.tqjq2bw9n)

## Description of the data and file structure

Parameters, behavioral, and neural data are given for each session in the paper. See Payne & Aronov 2025 for methodological details. 

### Files and variables

Data is included in the \"data\" folder. Files are stored in MATLAB (.mat) format.

#### SESSIONS.xlsx

Excel spreadsheet containing information for each experimental recording session.

#### SURGERY.xlsx

Excel spreadsheet containing information for each probe implant.

#### Session folders

In the format `BIRD_YYMMDD`

##### params.mat

Parameters for this session.

**`P_expmt`**: parameters stored during the experiment. Key parameters useful for analysis are:
`task`: task type
`track_type`: type of gaze used to trigger sites
`p_feeders`: locations of feeders and other session parameters.
`r_gaze`: gaze radius to trigger sites

**`P_calib`*...,