Progressive transformation of hippocampal neuronal representations in "morphed" environments.

By J. Leutgeb, Stefan Leutgeb, Alessandro Treves, R. Meyer, C. A. Barnes, Bruce L. McNaughton, May-Britt Moser, Edvard I. Moser. Neuron, 2005

365 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Hippocampal neural codes for different, familiar environments are thought to reflect distinct attractor states, possibly implemented in the recurrent CA3 network. A defining property of an attractor network is its ability to undergo sharp and coherent transitions between pre-established (learned) representations when the inputs to the network are changed. To determine whether hippocampal neuronal ensembles exhibit such discontinuities, we recorded in CA3 and CA1 when a familiar square recording enclosure was morphed in quantifiable steps into a familiar circular enclosure while leaving other inputs constant. We observed a gradual noncoherent progression from the initial to the final network state. In CA3, the transformation was accompanied by significant hysteresis, resulting in more similar end states than when only square and circle were presented. These observations suggest that hippocampal cell assemblies are capable of incremental plastic deformation, with incongruous information being incorporated into pre-existing representations.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b967b48286d19f5aac3163dc685bc86dc92cf3bd

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

Flexible Kernel Memory (2010, background): “Memory experiments demonstrated persistent activity in several structures in the lower mammal, primate, and human brains including the hippocampus [1,2], prefrontal [3], visual [4] and oculomotor cortex [5], basal ganglia [6], etc. Persistent dynamics is believed to emerge as attractor dynamics…”
Place cells, grid cells, and the brain's spatial representation system. (2008, background): “Two forms of remapping have been reported (Leutgeb et al. 2005b): The cell population may undergo complete orthogonalization of both firing locations and firing rates (global remapping), or the rate distribution may be changed selectively in the presence of stable firing locations (rate remapping).”
Neural Ensembles in CA3 Transiently Encode Paths Forward of the Animal at a Decision Point (2007, background): “Place cells have been shown to consistently disambiguate different environments (Leutgeb et al., 2005; Wills et al., 2005).”
Impaired spatial representation in CA1 after lesion of direct input from entorhinal cortex. (2008, neutral): “Article”
Hippocampal “time cells” bridge the gap in memory for discontiguous events (2011, neutral): “The cross-correlation analysis indicated that most neurons (90%, 46/51) that retimed in block 2 maintained the altered pattern through block 3, similar to the hysteresis reported for partial remapping of place cells (Leutgeb et al., 2005a).”