Low rate hippocampal delay period activity encodes behavioral experience

2024/06/05 by Markos Athanasiadis, Stefano Masserini, Li Yuan +4
Neuroscience · #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Neuroinflammation and Neurodegeneration Mechanisms #Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research

paper · pdf · doi:10.1002/hipo.23619

openalex publication_date 2024/06/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/25

Abstract

Remembering what just happened is a crucial prerequisite to form long-term memories but also for establishing and maintaining working memory. So far there is no general agreement about cortical mechanisms that support short-term memory. Using a classifier-based decoding approach, we report that hippocampal activity during few sparsely distributed brief time intervals contains information about the previous sensory motor experience of rodents. These intervals are characterized by only a small increase of firing rate of only a few neurons. These low-rate predictive patterns are present in both working memory and non-working memory tasks, in two rodent species, rats and Mongolian gerbils, are strongly reduced for rats with medial entorhinal cortex lesions, and depend on the familiarity of the sensory-motor context.

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