What Do Place Cells Tell Us about Learning to Associate and Learning to Segregate?

The nervous system is tasked with activating several memories concurrently without confusing them, creating the need to segregate simultaneously relevant but distinct memories. This chapter focuses on this problem of segregating different, concurrently relevant representations. It examines this question in the context of hippocampal spatial representations, first reviewing behavioral evidence that rats use two concurrent spatial reference frames. It then reviews evidence that the hippocampus is important for the ability to segregate locations in the different spatial frames. Finally, it presents preliminary evidence for a functional grouping of place cell responses, as one of the mechanisms to achieve this segregation of distinct memories.