Think! Evidence

Replay of memories of extended behavior in the rat hippocampus

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dc.contributor Matthew Wilson.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.contributor Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.creator Davidson, Thomas James Damon Cheakamus
dc.date 2010-04-28T17:10:54Z
dc.date 2010-04-28T17:10:54Z
dc.date 2009
dc.date 2009
dc.identifier http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/54622
dc.identifier 601809026
dc.description Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2009.
dc.description Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
dc.description Includes bibliographical references.
dc.description The hippocampus is a highly conserved structure in the medial temporal lobe of the brain that is known to be critical for spatial learning in rodents, and spatial and episodic memory in humans. During pauses in exploration, ensembles of place cells in the rat hippocampus re-express firing sequences corresponding to recent spatial experience. Such 'replay' co-occurs with ripple events: short-lasting (~50-120 ms), high frequency (-200 Hz) oscillations that are associated with increased hippocampal-cortical communication. In previous studies, rats explored small environments, and replay was found to be anchored to the rat's current location, and compressed in time such that replay of the complete environment occurred during a single ripple event. In this thesis, we develop a probabilistic neural decoding approach that allows us to show that firing sequences corresponding to long runs through a large environment are replayed with high fidelity (in both forward and reverse order). We show that such replay can begin at remote locations on the track, and proceeds at a characteristic virtual speed of -8 m/s. Replay remains coherent across trains of sharp wave-ripple events. These results suggest that extended replay is composed of chains of shorter subsequences, which may reflect a strategy for the storage and flexible expression of memories of prolonged experience. We discuss the evidence for the operation of similar mechanisms in humans.
dc.description by Thomas James Davidson.
dc.description Ph.D.
dc.format 137 p.
dc.format application/pdf
dc.language eng
dc.publisher Massachusetts Institute of Technology
dc.rights M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.
dc.rights http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582
dc.subject Brain and Cognitive Sciences.
dc.title Replay of memories of extended behavior in the rat hippocampus
dc.type Thesis


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