The Hinman lab is broadly interested in spatial cognition and memory. The lab investigates how the brain represents space in order to navigate the world. To those ends we employ high-density electrophysiology and calcium imaging in freely behaving rats in order to record/image large populations of individual neurons from brain regions such as hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, retrosplenial cortex, and striatum while rats engage in a variety of tasks. Such data allows us to identify the coding properties of individual neurons, as well as investigate the structure of population coding.

An important feature of many environments is the social landscape. Knowing who is around you is critically important for many animal species and the Hinman lab is investigating how the brain dynamically represents the spatial location of conspecifics, whether that conspecific is higher or lower in the social hierarchy or a complete stranger. By monitoring cohabitating groups of rats during adolescence we identify the social relationship between each member of the group and then record or image neural activity during social interactions between pairs of rats with a known relationship. By incorporating genetic Autism model rats in the group we are investigating how the neural representation of others is altered in animals with known differences in social interactions.