Vanderwolf spent over 30 years at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, during which time he published over 140 papers on the relation of hippocampal, neocortical, and pyriform cortical activity to behavior and the dependence of many of these brain-behavior relations on the activity of central neurons that release the transmitter substances acetylcholine and serotonin (Whishaw and Bland 1998; Buzsaki and Bland 2015).
As early as 1964, he was among the first investigators to carefully study the correlation between observable motor activity and brain waves.
Recording from the thalamus and hippocampus of the behaving rat, he found a reliable relationship between 'voluntary movement' and rhythmic (theta) EEG activity.
He showed that in the waking rat, hippocampal EEG is dominated by thetaoscillations (6 to 10 Hz; for this he coined a new term, rhythmic slow activity or RSA) during locomotion, rearing, exploratory head turning, and sniffing.
In contrast, in other observable behaviors such as eating, drinking, grooming, and immobility, theta is replaced by "large amplitude irregular activity" (LIA).