The hippocampus is a crucial brain structure involved in spatial navigation. It contains populations of spatially sensitive cells as the place cells, head-direction cells, grid cells, border cells, or object-vector cells. These neurons together create a cognitive map of the environment that serves for navigation in space. The role of hippocampal cells in the encoding of positions of other objects has also been suggested. Other studies found so-called time cells in the hippocampus that are active during specific delays in a behavioral task and associated them with place cells. While there are recent studies researching the encoding of accessible objects' positions, the encoding of objects in the inaccessible space has lacked research. The neural representation of dynamic situations (that constitute the majority of real-world encounters) has also been only scarcely researched. We designed a behavioral task to study the learning of static and dynamic spatial visual scenes presented in the inaccessible space and combined it with single-unit electrophysiological recording from the CA1 area of the hippocampus of freely moving rats. Our results show that rats can discriminate both static and dynamic inaccessible spatial stimuli, and that they prefer dynamic over static stimuli. They can also generalize...
