Identification of a Functional Connectome for Long-Term Fear Memory in Mice

By A. Wheeler, C. Teixeira, Afra H. Wang, Xuejian Xiong, Natasa Kovacevic, Jason P. Lerch, Anthony Randal McIntosh, J. Parkinson, Paul W. Frankland. PLoS Comput. Biol., 2013

299 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Long-term memories are thought to depend upon the coordinated activation of a broad network of cortical and subcortical brain regions. However, the distributed nature of this representation has made it challenging to define the neural elements of the memory trace, and lesion and electrophysiological approaches provide only a narrow window into what is appreciated a much more global network. Here we used a global mapping approach to identify networks of brain regions activated following recall of long-term fear memories in mice. Analysis of Fos expression across 84 brain regions allowed us to identify regions that were co-active following memory recall. These analyses revealed that the functional organization of long-term fear memories depends on memory age and is altered in mutant mice that exhibit premature forgetting. Most importantly, these analyses indicate that long-term memory recall engages a network that has a distinct thalamic-hippocampal-cortical signature. This network is concurrently integrated and segregated and therefore has small-world properties, and contains hub-like regions in the prefrontal cortex and thalamus that may play privileged roles in memory expression.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/687e3888448d22abf2b4efb4a057c159655bc09a

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Memory engrams: Recalling the past and imagining the future (2020, methodology): “84, 241–246 (1997). doi: 10.1016/S0166-4328(96)00153-2; pmid: 9079788 237.”
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