#JournalClub on Closed-loop modulation of remote hippocampal representations with neurofeedback, from #FrankLab: little summary + comments.

• The goal is to see if rats can deliberately reactivate internal representations, without external cues.
• The authors design a closed-loop system that does clusterless real-time decoding of position and rewards the rats when they reactivate a specific maze arm end.
  
• The rats go through a gradual training process: first getting reward on the actual maze (a T-maze), then getting reward in the home box when they orient towards the target arm of the maze [head-direction task], then getting reward in the home box when they reactivate the representation of the target maze end [neurofeedback task].
• The rat's performance is not too bad given the difficulty of the task, kudos to Rat2 who seemed to really know what he was doing.
• interestingly, the reactivations do not happen during #SharpWaveRipples, and not really during theta either, just during an uncharacterised LFP state.
• Little caveat 1: as far as I can see, the head-direction of the rats is not shown in any plot and it is not possible to say if the rats might still be doing the head-direction task during the neurofeedback task. That being said, the rats clearly reactivate the target arm more in the neurofeedback than head-direction task, which is quite convincing.

• Little caveat 2: the performance is always shown in terms of total rewards collected, and not reward rate. So in different sessions rats might reach the maximum reward but take twice the time. Showing reward rate would be more informative.

• conclusion: this is pretty cool, but we would really need to know about the head-direction.

• question for the audience: what do you think the rats "think about" during those reactivation moments??

#Neuroscience #HippocampalReplay (not really) #ThetaSequences (not really) #PlaceCells #NeuroRat #Hippocampus