Internally Generated Cell Assembly Sequences in the Rat Hippocampus

By Eva Pastalkova, Vladimir Itskov, Asohan Amarasingham, G. Buzsáki. 2008

636 citations recorded by the source corpus.

A long-standing conjecture in neuroscience is that aspects of cognition depend on the brain's ability to self-generate sequential neuronal activity. We found that reliably and continually changing cell assemblies in the rat hippocampus appeared not only during spatial navigation but also in the absence of changing environmental or body-derived inputs. During the delay period of a memory task, each moment in time was characterized by the activity of a particular assembly of neurons. Identical initial conditions triggered a similar assembly sequence, whereas different conditions gave rise to different sequences, thereby predicting behavioral choices, including errors. Such sequences were not formed in control (nonmemory) tasks. We hypothesize that neuronal representations, evolved for encoding distance in spatial navigation, also support episodic recall and the planning of action sequences.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Theta oscillations provide temporal windows for local circuit computation in the entorhinal-hippocampal loop (2009, neutral): “Recordings were carried out while the animal explored an open field (180 cm by 180 cm or 120 cm by 120 cm), ran on a linear track (250 cm long) or performed in a T maze alternation task or a rewarded wheel-running task (Pastalkova et al., 2008).”
Sequence Learning and the Role of the Hippocampus in Rodent Navigation (2012, positive): “However, the development of multi-electrode recording techniques, which allow the simultaneous recording of dozens of neurons, has allowed quantitative analyses of neural populations that have begun to shed light on how the hippocampus can create representations of spatial (and perhaps temporal [2,3”
Memory without Feedback in a Neural Network (2009, neutral): “Strongly temporally varying activity has been observed in neuronalrecordingsobtainedduringavarietyofworkingmemory relatedtasks(Baegetal.,2003;Batuev,1994;Batuevetal.,1979; Brody et al., 2003a; Deadwyler and Hampson, 2006; Pastalkova et al., 2008).”
Emergence of Dynamic Memory Traces in Cortical Microcircuit Models through STDP (2013, neutral): “In fact, a fairly large number of experimental studies (Abeles, 1991; Jones et al., 2007; Luczak et al., 2007; Fujisawa et al., 2008; Pastalkova et al., 2008; Luczak et al., 2009; Bathellier et al., 2012; Harvey et al., 2012; Xu et al., 2012) suggest that stereotypical trajectories of network…”
Disruption of ripple-associated hippocampal activity during rest impairs spatial learning in the rat (2009, neutral): “Replay events are one manifestation of a more general phenomenon, which is the existence of internally generated structured activity in the hippocampus (Gelbard-Sagiv et al., 2008; Pastalkova et al., 2008).”
Recurrent Network Models of Sequence Generation and Memory. (2016, neutral): “Sequences may effectively mediate the short-term memory engaged in these tasks.”
The Theta-Gamma Neural Code (2013, positive): “These and related results (Lenck-Santini et al., 2008; Pastalkova et al., 2008) suggest that the hippocampus uses a code in which theta phase carries information.”
Evidence for the default network's role in spontaneous cognition. (2010, neutral): “…during stopped periods reflect prior environmental input and, under certain conditions, correlate with the animal's future choices, including errors in behavior (Buckner 2010; Diba and Buzsáki 2007; Foster and Wilson 2006; Johnson and Redish 2007; Lisman and Redish 2009; Pastalkova et al. 2008).”
Hippocampal “time cells” bridge the gap in memory for discontiguous events (2011, positive): “In an extension of those studies, Pastalkova et al. (2008) revealed the existence of hippocampal neurons that fire at specific moments as rats walk on a running wheel between trials, and some of these cells distinguished subsequent left and right turn trials.”