A critical task of the central nervous system is to learn causal relationships between stimuli to anticipate events in the future, such as the position of a moving prey or predator. What are the neuronal phenomena underlying anticipation? In this article, I review recent results in hippocampal electrophysiology that shed light on this issue. It is shown that hippocampal spatial receptive fields show large and rapid anticipatory changes in their firing characteristics. These changes are experience- and environment-dependent and can be explained by a computational model based on NMDA-dependent synaptic plasticity during behavior. Striking similarities between the anticipatory network dynamics of widely different neural circuits, such as the hippocampus and primary visual cortex, are discussed. These experimental and theoretical results indicate how the microscopic laws of synaptic plasticity give rise to emergent anticipatory properties of receptive fields and behavior.
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