A stable hippocampal representation of a space requires its direct experience
Open accessAbstract
In humans and other mammals, the hippocampus is critical for episodic memory, the autobiographical record of events, including where and when they happen. When one records from hippocampal pyramidal neurons in awake, behaving rodents, their most obvious firing correlate is the animal's position within a particular environment, earning them the name "place cells." When an animal explores a novel environment, its pyramidal neurons form their spatial receptive fields over a matter of minutes and are generally stable thereafter. This experience-dependent stabilization of place fields is therefore an attractive candidate neural correlate of the formation of hippocampal memory. However, precisely how the animal's experience of a context translates into stable place fields remains largely unclear. For instance, we still do not know whether observation of a space is sufficient to generate a stable hippocampal representation of that space because the animal must physically visit a spot to demonstrate which cells fire there. We circumvented this problem by comparing the relative stability of place fields of directly experienced space from merely observed space following blockade of NMDA receptors, which preferentially destabilizes newly generated place fields. This allowed us to determine whether place cells stably represent parts of the environment the animal sees, but does not actually occupy. We found that the formation of stable place fields clearly requires direct experience with…
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Pharmacological blockade of NMDARs prevents the stabilization of new place fields.
“However, pharmacological blockade of NMDARs prevents the stabilization of new place fields (418, 419)”
From Synaptic memory and CaMKII (2023) · cites this paper as [418]
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- Authors
- Rowland, D. C., Yanovich, Y., & Kentros, C. G.
- Affiliations
- Departments of aBiology and
- University of Oregon (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2011-08-18
- Volume
- 108
- Issue
- 35
- Pages
- 14654-14658
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC3167555
- OpenAlex
- W2170347881
- Cited by
- 40
- References
- 33
- Citations by year
- 2025: 1 · 2024: 2 · 2023: 2 · 2022: 2 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 2 · 2018: 2 · 2016: 3 · 2015: 4 · 2014: 7 · 2013: 3 · 2012: 3
- FWCI
- 2.11
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute of General Medical Sciences (T32GM007257)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Memory and Neural Mechanisms
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience › Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Developmental Neuroscience › Neurogenesis and neuroplasticity mechanisms
- Keywords
- place cells, hippocampus, episodic memory, spatial memory, NMDA receptor blockade, novel environment exploration, direct experience, spatial receptive fields, hippocampal pyramidal neurons, autobiographical memory
- MeSH terms
- Animals, Hippocampus, Male, Memory, Piperazines, Receptors, N-Methyl-D-Aspartate, Rats, Long-Evans, Rats
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