Prediction, Sequences, and the Hippocampus

There is now strong evidence that the activity in the rodent hippocampus can reflect predictive information about potential future events and places, particularly on the order of several seconds in the future. Moreover, while animals can predict outcomes in simple conditioning tasks without a hippocampus, the hippocampus is necessary for predictions that involve novel sequences or temporal gaps, particularly when this prediction requires the integration of spatially and temporally separated information. This chapter reviews the evidence that hippocampal representations show predictive sequences during behaviors that depend on hippocampal integrity.