Hippocampus Can Organize Memories for Events as Well as Places

11/06/2017

People organize memories in photo albums, journals or calendars, but how does the brain first put events in order? Though a great deal of work has been done on how the brain encodes memory for locations, leading to the discovery of ‘place cells’ in the hippocampus, we still have relatively little understanding of how personally experienced, or episodic, memories are represented by neurons. Now, researchers at Japan’s RIKEN Brain Science Institute have found that the hippocampus can generalize, putting not just places but also events into sequence by changing the neural code in the rat brain. These ‘event cells’ discovered by the researchers may be a bridge linking information about the world with subsequent decision-making.

Neurons have two main ways they can signal to each other: by changing the timing or the frequency of their firing. In this study, Shigeyoshi Fujisawa and colleagues looked at how these two parameters changed while rats did a decision-making task based on certain combinations of smells and sounds. Using non-spatial stimuli presented in sequence was crucial to demonstrating that cells in the hippocampus also represent events, not just places. The study was published in the journal Neuron on June 8.

The research team recorded the combined activity of a large number of neurons in central hippocampal area CA1 while rats were engaged in choosing different sound-odor combinations to get a water reward. Many cells displayed elevated activity in response to one or both stimuli–often with a strong preference for one odor or sound versus the other–and retained this activation through the ‘decision’ phase, indicating that the inputs were being integrated by the brain and retained in a specific order to facilitate a subsequent choice.