ИСТИНА

Understanding how animals encode information about their environment is a key focus of neuroscience. Studying animal behavior during exploration and the activity of spatially specific neurons helps unravel the mechanisms of spatial information processing. The hippocampus plays a crucial role in processing spatial information and orientation. When animals explore a novel environment, they encode and retain spatial features, such as object positions, landmarks, lighting, and other contextual attributes. Place cells in the hippocampus are critical in these processes and are influenced by local visual cues, like surface textures and wall markings, as well as distant environmental cues. The geometric configuration of the environment significantly affects place cell formation, with activity fields clustering near boundaries between different zones. Wang et al. introduced environmental heterogeneity using contrasting colors and varied floor textures, the activity fields of hippocampal place cells were concentrated along the boundaries of contrasting zones. In our study, we used calcium imaging to record CA1 hippocampal activity in mice to determine whether specific encoding of flat two-dimensional environmental elements would be observed. Therefore, our mice explored an arena with contrasting floor colors. This allowed us to assess the influence of a single factor (floor coloring) on spatial mapping, determine if mice perceive and attend to these surface cues during movement, and evaluate their behavioral patterns in such environments.