Researchers in our social-media feeds this week took note of two new studies of the hippocampus, both published 3 April in Nature Neuroscience. The first study explored how people use and update their cognitive maps of spatial information during a navigation task.
There has been a lot of progress in our understanding of how the brain organises relationships in cognitive maps. But how is this knowledge used when guiding novel choice? Work with @TankredSaanum, @cpilab, @nico_schuck & @doellerlab now in @NatureNeuro https://t.co/Aq6IKtM4Wp pic.twitter.com/eONRpGSXvt
— Mona Garvert (@mona_garvert) April 3, 2023
Study participants played a computer game in which they learned to locate 12 monsters inside a virtual arena. They then used that knowledge on subsequent tasks. For example, after seeing an image of one monster, participants saw two others and had to choose which one was located closer to the first in the arena.
On a final test, participants were able to combine the knowledge gained from the various tasks to correctly infer information about the remaining monsters. “This suggests that participants formed and used a map for generalization!” tweeted Mona Garvert of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in a thread detailing her team’s work.
This suggests that participants formed and used a map for generalization! And indeed, using fMRI adaptation we found a representation of the spatial map in the hippocampus. However, not only spatial relationships between monsters were represented in the hippocampus! pic.twitter.com/gPZ9VU37K4
— Mona Garvert (@mona_garvert) April 3, 2023
“Great to see this cool study … on cognitive maps and generalization out!” tweeted Erie Boorman of the University of California, Davis.
Great to see this cool study from @mona_garvert, @nico_schuck and @doellerlab and team on cognitive maps and generalization out! Many congrats! ???????? https://t.co/6GRxE6HHzV
— Erie Boorman (@ErieBoorman) April 3, 2023
Philipp Paulus of the Imaging Memory and Consolidation Lab at the University of Freiburg lauded the “great results” in the paper.
Congratulations, Mona! It really is such a nice study with great results.
— Philipp Paulus (@pauluspc) April 4, 2023
The other paper that rose to the top of our feeds this week tracked how neuron activity in two areas of the hippocampus — dorsal and ventral — evolved during an odor-learning task in mice.
Tracking the same hippocampal dorsal CA1 and ventral CA1 neurons during odor–outcome learning shows that initially odors elicited responses in dCA1, whereas odor responses in vCA1 emerged later and represented the outcome
New from @mazen_kheirbek et al.https://t.co/LHYVzmd89n
— Nature Neuroscience (@NatureNeuro) April 3, 2023
The results “show how the hippocampus encodes, stores and updates learned associations and illuminates the unique contributions of dorsal and ventral hippocampus,” according to the study.
Mazen Kheirbek of University of California, San Francisco, tweeted a video clip of neurons, along with a link to his team’s study.
New paper from the lab out today! @jeremy_biane, @max_ladow and team describe how neural population dynamics in dorsal and ventral CA1 evolve with associative learning and outcome expectation. Full text here: https://t.co/lSMxx8zRGU https://t.co/CUmAd2Qv6j pic.twitter.com/63tgeiq2d5
— Mazen Kheirbek (@mazen_kheirbek) April 3, 2023
“Been following this story for a while and so excited to see it out!” tweeted Yasmine Ayman of Harvard University.
Been following this story for a while and so excited to see it out! Congrats to the team ???? https://t.co/9sNDLSnQzx
— Yasmine Ayman یاسی آیمن (@YasmineAyman20) April 3, 2023
“This is awesome!!” tweeted Kate Wassum of the University of California, Los Angeles.
This is awesome!! Congrats to you and the team!
— Kate Wassum ???????????????? (@KateWassum) April 4, 2023
That’s it for this week’s Community Newsletter! If you have any suggestions for interesting social posts you saw in the autism research sphere, feel free to send an email to [email protected].
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