The Role of Hippocampal Replay in Memory and Planning

By H. F. Ólafsdóttir, Daniel Bush, C. Barry. 2018

371 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary The mammalian hippocampus is important for normal memory function, particularly memory for places and events. Place cells, neurons within the hippocampus that have spatial receptive fields, represent information about an animal’s position. During periods of rest, but also during active task engagement, place cells spontaneously recapitulate past trajectories. Such ‘replay’ has been proposed as a mechanism necessary for a range of neurobiological functions, including systems memory consolidation, recall and spatial working memory, navigational planning, and reinforcement learning. Focusing mainly, but not exclusively, on work conducted in rodents, we describe the methodologies used to analyse replay and review evidence for its putative roles. We identify outstanding questions as well as apparent inconsistencies in existing data, making suggestions as to how these might be resolved. In particular, we find support for the involvement of replay in disparate processes, including the maintenance of hippocampal memories and decision making. We propose that the function of replay changes dynamically according to task demands placed on an organism and its current level of arousal.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

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Citations in the corpus

Replay in Deep Learning: Current Approaches and Missing Biological Elements (2021, neutral): “While there have been multiple reviews of replay in the brain (Tingley & Peyrache, 2020; Ólafsdóttir, Bush, & Barry, 2018; Pfeiffer, 2020; Foster, 2017; Robert-son & Genzel, 2020) and reviews of continual learning in artificial networks (Kemker, McClure, Abitino, Hayes, & Kanan, 2018; Parisi,…”
Hippocampal replays under the scrutiny of reinforcement learning models. (2018, result): “This is in line with recent experimental results (Ambrose et al. 2016; Ólafsdóttir et al. 2017).”
Few-Shot Self Reminder to Overcome Catastrophic Forgetting (2018, background): “Interestingly, there has been evidence from neuroscience that suggests the brain uses hippocampal replay to consolidate memory [7, 27].”
Hippocampal Reactivation of Random Trajectories Resembling Brownian Diffusion. (2019, background): “While replay has been associated with a number of mnemonic processes, including consolidation in sleep, goal-directed navigation, and decisionmaking at maze choice points (Ólafsdóttir et al., 2018), the mechanisms underlying its generation remain controversial.”
How Generative Adversarial Networks and Their Variants Work (2017, background): “On the other hand, the mammalian brain has a mechanism called hippocampal replay that overcomes catastrophic forgetting by transferring information from shortterm memory to long-term memory [94].”