Hippocampus anatomy and visual cortex mouse

The first form of memory, called stimulus selective response plasticity (SRP) involves learning to recognize a non-rewarding, non-threatening single visual stimulus after it has been presented over and over. To make their findings, the researchers including former postdoc Rob Komorowski trained mice with two forms of visual recognition memory discovered in BearвЂ™s lab. вЂњThe exciting part of this is that the visual cortex seems to be involved in encoding both very simple visual stimuli and also temporal sequences of them, and yet the hippocampus is selectively involved in how that sequence is stored,вЂќ Finnie said.ДЄbove: A pair of mouse brain cross-sections shows an unaltered one on the left and one with significant removal of the hippocampus on the right. вЂњThis offers the opportunity to actually understand, in a very concrete way, how the hippocampus contributes to memory storage in the cortex,вЂќ said senior author Mark Bear, Picower Professor of Neuroscience in The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and MITвЂ™s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.Д®ssentially, the hippocampus acts to influence how images are stored in the cortex if they have a sequential relationship, said lead author Peter Finnie, a former postdoc in BearвЂ™s lab. A new MIT study of how a mammalian brain remembers what it sees shows that while individual images are stored in the visual cortex, the ability to recognize a sequence of sights critically depends on guidance from the hippocampus, a deeper structure strongly associated with memory but shrouded in mystery about exactly how.Д«y suggesting that the hippocampus isnвЂ™t needed for basic storage of images so much as identifying the chronological relationship they may have, the new research published in Current Biology can bring neuroscientists closer to understanding how the brain coordinates long-term visual memory across key regions.

Hippocampus anatomy and visual cortex mouse