Abstract
The hippocampus is a neural structure central to the formation of memories and wayfinding. To understand the neural mechanisms at work during memory formation over multiple episodes, Electrophysiological recordings show that neurons in the macaque hippocampus encode complex conjunctions of traits relevant to the navigational task during virtual navigation. While a majority encode environment-specific cues, about one third exhibit correlated firing across different environments sharing the same spatial structure. The similarity of firing appeared to encode the logic of the task in a way akin to a schema. The existence of the schema cells offers a foundation for abstraction in the monkey and suggests that memory storage in the primate could proceed in a similar way from simple cue associations up to conceptual thinking.
Highlights
Memory is the backbone of the mind
Bergson (L’énergie spirituelle) knowledge is still unknown. We addressed this question in the monkey, a species closer to us than the rat, while the animals learnt to find their way in a virtual maze
Viewed as a function of the location of the animal in the maze, hippocampal cells activity was similar to the place cells generally described in the rodent
Summary
By linking different aspects of sensory, motor, or affective experience, the hippocampus contributes to storing episodes of an individual’s life. This structure has been studied in great detail in the rodent, where the hippocampus has been shown to harbor “place cells” [7], whose activities encodes far beyond the animal’s position in space. Each of these cells exhibits a preferential firing when an animal is in a specific place in a given environment, thereby encoding the space in which the animal moves. The extent to which the hippocampus represents knowledge about a specific environment or a more generic, conceptual
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