Neural mechanism involved in contextual memory: role of CA3 and CA1 remapping

BELLUSICO, MARIANO; SILVA, AZUL; BEKINSCHTEIN, PEDRO

Cordoba

Congreso; XXXIV Congreso anual de la Sociedad Argentina de Neurociencias (SAN); 2019

The Hippocampus (HP) is involved in encoding, consolidation and retrieval of episodic memories. Some hippocampal neurons, place cells (PC) are tuned to spatial location and generally change their tunning when an animal change context (remapping). It has been suggested that the hippocampal ability of storing and distinguishing between different situations and contexts can be related with place cell?s remapping. Several studies have shown how PC can either remap or not as a consequence of changes in the environment. It is also known that there are differences between CA1 and CA3 (two hippocampal regions) in spatial codification. Still, there is no study showing the link between the memory that the animal is expressing and the activity of its neurons. In other words, It?s still unknown whether when an animal recognizes a certain context as new, there is remapping in the HP or not. The aim of this project is to understand how the differential remapping observed in CA1 and CA3 correlates with the behavioral response. To answer this question we use a behavioral task that allowed us to discriminate if an animal recognizes a context as new, or as one they already knows. We carried out electrophysiological recordings in CA3 and CA1 region of the HP while they were performing the tasks in order to correlate the remapping and the evocation of different contexts.