Projections from neocortex mediate top-down control of memory retrieval

By Priyamvada Rajasethupathy, Sethuraman Sankaran, James H. Marshel, Christina K. Kim, Emily Ferenczi, Soo Yeun Lee, Andre Berndt, Charu Ramakrishnan, Anna W Jaffe, Maisie Lo and 2 more. Nature, 2015

439 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Top-down prefrontal cortex inputs to the hippocampus have been hypothesized to be important in memory consolidation, retrieval, and the pathophysiology of major psychiatric diseases; however, no such direct projections have been identified and functionally described. Here we report the discovery of a monosynaptic prefrontal cortex (predominantly anterior cingulate) to hippocampus (CA3 to CA1 region) projection in mice, and find that optogenetic manipulation of this projection (here termed AC–CA) is capable of eliciting contextual memory retrieval. To explore the network mechanisms of this process, we developed and applied tools to observe cellular-resolution neural activity in the hippocampus while stimulating AC–CA projections during memory retrieval in mice behaving in virtual-reality environments. Using this approach, we found that learning drives the emergence of a sparse class of neurons in CA2/CA3 that are highly correlated with the local network and that lead synchronous population activity events; these neurons are then preferentially recruited by the AC–CA projection during memory retrieval. These findings reveal a sparsely implemented memory retrieval mechanism in the hippocampus that operates via direct top-down prefrontal input, with implications for the patterning and storage of salient memory representations.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/803fbe57ac20542b032370e5ee115d0a669ecbae

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

Bidirectional Interaction of Hippocampal Ripples and Cortical Slow Waves Leads to Coordinated Spiking Activity During NREM Sleep. (2020, background): “Projections from PFC (anterior cingulate, ACC) back to CA1 were found in mice (Rajasethupathy et al. 2015), but parallel”
What Can Ethobehavioral Studies Tell Us About The Brain’s Fear System? (2016, background): “The hippocampus is also implicated when spatial/contextual information influences fear conditioning [13,14], and a very recent study revealed that a monosynaptic projection from the anterior cingulate to the hippocampus mediates retrieval of contextual fear memory [15].”