Temporal Stability of Aversive Memories is Determined by Lateral Habenula activity

JOAQUIN PIRIZ

Mar del Plata

Congreso; XXX Annual Meeting of the Argentinean Society for Neurosciences; 2015

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Neurociencias

The Lateral Habenula (LHb) encodes negative value signals. It has been shown recently that LHb activation is sufficient to induce aversive associative learning; however the key question about whether LHb activation is required for an aversive memory to be formed has not been addressed. We studied the function of the LHb in memory formation using the Inhibitory Avoidance task (IA).We found that LHb inactivation during IA training does not disrupt memory when assessed 24h after, but abolishes it 7 days later, indicating that LHb activity during memory acquisition is not necessary for memory formation, but regulates its temporal stability. We are currently analyzing how LHb relates to brain regions involved in memory storage such as the hippocampus