Differential Relation between Neuronal and Behavioral Discrimination during Hippocampal Memory Encoding

Manuela Allegra (1) , Lorenzo Posani (1) , Ruy Gómez-Ocádiz (1, 2) , Christoph Schmidt-Hieber (1)

1 Département de Neuroscience - Department of Neuroscience
2 Collège Doctoral

How are distinct memories formed and used for behavior? To relate neuronal and behavioral discrimination during memory formation, we use in vivo 2-photon Ca 2+ imaging and whole-cell recordings from hippocampal subregions in head-fixed mice performing a spatial virtual-reality task. We find that both subthreshold activity as well as population codes of dentate gyrus neurons robustly discriminate across different spatial environments, while neuronal remapping in CA1 depends on the degree of difference between visual cues. Moreover, neuronal discrimination in CA1, but not in the dentate gyrus, reflects behavioral performance. Our results suggest that CA1 weights the decorrelated information from the dentate gyrus according to its relevance, thereby producing a map of memory representations that can be used by downstream circuits to guide learning and behavior.

Keywords: calcium imaging; cognitive map; dentate gyrus; hippocampus; memory; patch clamp; pattern separation; virtual reality

Domains: Neurons and Cognition [q-bio.NC]

Manuela Allegra, Lorenzo Posani, Ruy Gómez-Ocádiz, Christoph Schmidt-Hieber. Differential Relation between Neuronal and Behavioral Discrimination during Hippocampal Memory Encoding. Neuron, 2020, 108 (6), pp.1103-1112.e6. ⟨10.1016/j.neuron.2020.09.032⟩. ⟨pasteur-03235036⟩