2015/10/26 by Owen Y. Chao, Joseph P. Huston, Jay‐Shake Li +3 · 3 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Neuroendocrine regulation and behavior #Neuroscience and Neuropharmacology Research
paper · doi:10.1002/hipo.22547
openalex publication_date 2015/10/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The prefrontal cortex directly projects to the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC), an important substrate for engaging item-associated information and relaying the information to the hippocampus. Here we ask to what extent the communication between the prefrontal cortex and LEC is critically involved in the processing of episodic-like memory. We applied a disconnection procedure to test whether the interaction between the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and LEC is essential for the expression of recognition memory. It was found that male rats that received unilateral NMDA lesions of the mPFC and LEC in the same hemisphere, exhibited intact episodic-like (what-where-when) and object-recognition memories. When these lesions were placed in the opposite hemispheres (disconnection), episodic-like and associative memories for object identity, location and context were impaired. However, the disconnection did not impair the components of episodic memory, namely memory for novel object (what), object place (where) and temporal order (when), per se. Thus, the present findings suggest that the mPFC and LEC are a critical part of a neural circuit that underlies episodic-like and associative object-recognition memory.