Fig. 3: Analysis of the theta-gamma coupling by theta component detection.

a Left: representative theta components (tSCs) extracted from PMCo and CA1 recordings. Spectral signatures in the frequency domain of the defined tSCs are plotted. Right: representative wavelet spectrograms of the five tSCs for both areas of recording. b Plot of the detection of the different tSCs in a representative recording case of PMCo (red dots) and CA1 (green dots) over corridor 3. The dots are slightly jittered to facilitate visualization. The diagram also shows the epochs of the animal movement (yellow segments) and the presence of the curtain, vomeronasal stimulus and reward (black segments). c Clustering of the grand average of the similarity strength (arbitrary units) of each spectral signature over the tSC, in each corridor, sector, for both recording areas (PMCo, green; CA1, red) for the three recording days. The nomenclature is defined as area (PMCo, P; CA1, C), corridor (c1–c4) and sector (s1–s4). Each row can be understood as a theta-gamma activity pattern correlated with the exploration induced by each of the virtual sectors. Warm colors indicate a strong presence of the tSC in that corridor–sector. The patterns corresponding to P-c3s3 and C-c3s3, i.e., those corresponding to the time when the urine stimulus is present, are framed in gray boxes. Clustering is based on the similarity of the patterns, calculated by Euclidean distance. d Plots of the comparison of activity patterns between sectors c2/s2 (visual cues), c2/s3 (olfactory views), and c3/s3 (vomeronasal cues), between both recordings (top) and for the same recording (bottom). The diagram visualizes the Euclidean distance of these comparisons (violet dots). 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.