A mechanism for the formation of hippocampal neuronal firing patterns that represent what happens where

• Autor(a) principal: Tort, Adriano Bretanha Lopes
• Data de Publicação: 2011
• Outros Autores: Komorowski, Robert, Kopell, Nancy, Eichenbaum, Howard
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional da UFRN
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio.ufrn.br/jspui/handle/123456789/23115
• topic: Hippocampal neuronal firing; Episodic memory; Synaptic plasticity mechanism

The association of specific events with the context in which they occur is a fundamental feature of episodic memory. However, the underlying network mechanisms generating what–where associations are poorly understood. Recently we reported that some hippocampal principal neurons develop representations of specific events occurring in particular locations (item-position cells). Here, we investigate the emergence of item-position selectivity as rats learn new associations for reward and find that before the animal’s performance rises above chance in the task, neurons that will later become itemposition cells have a strong selective bias toward one of two behavioral responses, which the animal will subsequently make to that stimulus. This response bias results in an asymmetry of neural activity on correct and error trials that could drive the emergence of particular item specificities based on a simple reward-driven synaptic plasticity mechanism.