– The potential role of the hippocampus in the encoding of memories of rules –

Centre Esther Koplowitz, Barcelona

Abstract:It has been well established that hippocampus is crucial for the formation of new memories. Even though this is a widely accepted cognitive and neuronal process, how to read out memories from the hippocampal neuronal activity is less agreed upon. In the last decades, we have learned a big deal about the spatial representation encoded in hippocampus, but much less regarding how information related to learning and recalling mnemonic objects is encoded in the neuronal activity. Due to the complexity of the information arriving from many brain regions and the associative nature of hippocampal computation, it is feasible that information in hippocampus is represented in a unique way that has nothing to do with what we know from other brain regions, for example, sensory or motor areas. Hippocampal neuronal representation could be encoded in high dimensional neuronal space where associations cannot be observed as the linear combination of the representations of each of parts, as would be expected from a Hebbian learning process.
I will present in my talk the concept of multiplicative tuning of neuronal responses (one type of mixed-selectivity) and demonstrate its existence in the neuronal representation of space in the hippocampal activity. In addition, I will introduce a novel behavioral paradigm to investigate how multiplicative tuning could explain memory-related neuronal activity. I will present a speculative model proposing the existence of hippocampal neuronal representation of rules of actions as the mnemonic objects that could help us to better read out how information is encoded in this brain region.

invited by: Jérôme Epsztein

Inmed meeting room, Monday March 9th, 11 am