A commonly heard claim is that the dorsal and ventral hippocampi in rats mediate different functions. They certainly have different outputs, but both dorsal and ventral receive input from the entorhinal cortex, and both project to the subiculum - so far as I know. My understanding is that the hippocampus as such forms a spatio-temporally extended representation of ongoing experience. Is that not the case for the dorsal or ventral hippocampus? Or is the representation the same in both poles; what makes the dorsal and ventral different is the systems to which they project?
Another point to add to the Fanselow paper, which was very helpful (thanks), is that the density of estrogen receptors follows a dorsal - ventral gradient, being much denser in the ventral pole.
One way that the Fanselow paper fell short is that it didn't address the question as to whether the representation mediated by the hippocampus (whatever that is) is qualitatively different in the dorsal vs. ventral poles. It does say that the size of place fields is much much larger in the ventral hippocampus of the rodent (on the order of multiple square meters!) than in the dorsal, which would suggest that the representation is similar dorsal vs. ventral.
I recommend you several articles by Bruce McEwen (key words: stress and hippocampal atrophy).
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