Fig. 2: Functional relationships of the PMCo–CA1 network in virtual environments.

a Representative case of raw records of local field potentials in PMCo (top) and CA1 (middle) through corridor 3. The movement of the animal is represented in the orange plot (bottom). b Wavelet coherogram (top) of the representative case in gray tones, where the lighter ones indicate a high degree of coactivity between both areas. The yellow segments represent motion, and the reddish segment represents the presence of the urinary stimulus. In the diagram, the segment corresponding to the recording represented in a is marked with a black line at the top. On the coherogram, the times (windows of 1 s) in which significant causality was detected in the theta range are marked with dots: blue dots, causality with predominant directionality PMCo → CA1 (a), and red dots for directionality CA1 → PMCo (b, c). The windows of analysis often show points in the two bands, thus demonstrating directionality in both directions, although one of them may predominate over the other. A plot of the density of causal dots along corridor 3 is shown at the bottom. c Left: average spectral coherence of the segment shown in a, which highlights a peak of synchronization in the theta frequency band. d Three plots of spectral causality corresponding to points (a), (b), and (c) in b. All three plots show causality peaks in the theta frequency range. e Grand average of the spectral coherence of all recordings highlighting the predominance synchronization in the theta range. Data are presented as mean values ± SEM. f Statistical comparison between the frequency peaks in both directionalities; two-sided t test, *p = 0.00019, n = 140 independent samples over five independent experiments; box plots are defined in terms of minima and maxima by whiskers, and the center and bounds of box by quartiles (Q₁–Q₃). g Diagram derived from the statistical analysis showing the proportion of times of each causal directionality (blue, directionality PMCo → CA1; red, directionality CA1 → PMCo) for each of the four sectors for each corridor. Data are presented as mean values ± SEM. Source data are provided as a Source data file. The raw data of the LFP recordings of the experiments in the virtual reality setup generated in this study are available in the Zenodo database⁵¹.