Hippocampal function in the rat: Cognitive mapping or vicarious trial and error?

Amsel, Abram

doi:10.1002/hipo.450030302

Cited by 57 publications

(37 citation statements)

References 49 publications

(49 reference statements)

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“…The mammalian [Amsel, 1993;Jarrard, 1993;Eichenbaum, 1996] and avian [Good, 1987;Reilly and Good, 1987;Good and Macphail, 1994a, b] hippocampus is not only important for spatial memory but also for a number of other cognitive functions that do not appear to involve spatial memory. The relationships between foraging ecology, MC and DC size, and behavior [Day et al, 1999] Fig.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative Medial and Dorsal Cortex Volume in Relation to Foraging Ecology in Congeneric Lizards

Day¹,

Crews²,

Wilczynski³

1999

Brain Behav Evol

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The need to locate distributed resources such as mates, food, and nests is correlated with an enlarged hippocampus in many mammalian and avian species. This correlation is believed to be a consequence of selection for spatial ability. Little is known about how such ecological needs affect non-mammalian, non-avian species. In lizards, the putative hippocampal homologues are the dorsal cortex (DC) and medial cortex (MC). We examined the relationship between foraging ecology and the size of the DC and MC in congeneric male lizards. We predicted based on the mammalian and avian literature that Acanthodactylus boskianus, an active forager that captures clumped, immobile prey would have a larger MC and DC than A. scutellatus, a sit-and-wait predator, that captures mobile prey. Our previous behavioral studies showed that A. boskianus did not differ from A. scutellatus on a spatial task but that A. boskianus was significantly better at the reversal of a visual discrimination, another task that is hippocampally dependent in mammals. In the current study, we found that, relative to telencephalon volume, the MC and DC were larger in the active forager whereas a control region, the lateral, olfactory, cortex, was similar in size between species. The current anatomical results suggest that MC and DC size is related to active foraging in lizards and, along with our previous behavioral studies, show that it is possible for this relationship to occur in the absence of evidence for species differences in spatial memory.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Relative Medial and Dorsal Cortex Volume in Relation to Foraging Ecology in Congeneric Lizards

Day¹,

Crews²,

Wilczynski³

1999

Brain Behav Evol

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“…1B). The decrease in swim speed during the first sessions of the spatial training (days 4 and 5) may reflect "hesitation" corresponding to a "mental" reorganization, found to be associated with the acquisition of a learned task (Teule et al 1972;Amsel 1993;Malleret et al 1999). This was not observed in middle-aged animals, as their swim speed remained constant across the entire experiment and equal to the swim speed of young animals during the acquisition of the spatial training.…”

Section: Behavioral Analysismentioning

confidence: 99%

Altered Hippocampal Transcript Profile Accompanies an Age-Related Spatial Memory Deficit in Mice

Verbitsky¹,

Yonan²,

Malleret³

et al. 2004

Learn. Mem.

153

110

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We have carried out a global survey of age-related changes in mRNA levels in the C57BL/6NIA mouse hippocampus and found a difference in the hippocampal gene expression profile between 2-month-old young mice and 15-month-old middle-aged mice correlated with an age-related cognitive deficit in hippocampal-based explicit memory formation. Middle-aged mice displayed a mild but specific deficit in spatial memory in the Morris water maze. By using Affymetrix GeneChip microarrays, we found a distinct pattern of age-related change, consisting mostly of gene overexpression in the middle-aged mice, suggesting that the induction of negative regulators in the middle-aged hippocampus could be involved in impairment of learning. Interestingly, we report changes in transcript levels for genes that could affect synaptic plasticity. Those changes could be involved in the memory deficits we observed in the 15-month-old mice. In agreement with previous reports, we also found altered expression in genes related to inflammation, protein processing, and oxidative stress.

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“…VTE behavior has been related to various cognitive processes, such as approach/avoidance inhibition and prediction of behavioral consequences (18). However, our interest here is the same as that of Tolman (7)(8)(9): the potential link that VTE behavior provides between memory-related processing and the ongoing control of behavior.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Spontaneous revisitation during visual exploration as a link among strategic behavior, learning, and the hippocampus

Voss

Warren

Gonsalves

et al. 2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

113

148

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Effective exploratory behaviors involve continuous updating of sensory sampling to optimize the efficacy of information gathering. Despite some work on this issue in animals, little information exists regarding the cognitive or neural mechanisms for this sort of behavioral optimization in humans. Here we examined a visual exploration phenomenon that occurred when human subjects studying an array of objects spontaneously looked "backward" in their scanning paths to view recently seen objects again. This "spontaneous revisitation" of recently viewed objects was associated with enhanced hippocampal activity and superior subsequent memory performance in healthy participants, but occurred only rarely in amnesic patients with severe damage to the hippocampus. These findings demonstrate the necessity of the hippocampus not just in the aspects of long-term memory with which it has been associated previously, but also in the short-term adaptive control of behavior. Functional neuroimaging showed hippocampal engagement occurring in conjunction with frontocerebellar circuits, thereby revealing some of the larger brain circuitry essential for the strategic deployment of information-seeking behaviors that optimize learning.amnesia | prefrontal cortex | vicarious trial-and-error behavior O ne of the hallmarks of higher cognitive functioning is the ability to flexibly tailor behaviors to current situational demands. An example comes from the purposeful way animals explore the environment, effectively sampling the particular information most critical for learning and later memory. A number of investigators have emphasized the critical role in such behaviors of memory systems (1, 2) and strategic/executive control systems (3, 4). Some theorizing about exploratory behaviors has emphasized the potential importance of constant iteration between perception and action (5, 6) or between prediction and verification (7-9). However, little is known, at least in humans, about precisely how processing in neural systems leads to the optimization of exploratory behaviors and how the behaviors, in turn, affect processing in these systems as learning occurs. This is partially because contemporary research often involves exposing individuals to some information and relating brain activity to the ability to later recall or recognize aspects of the original learning event (10). Findings therefore primarily concern processes closely allied with introspective reports rather than the processes by which memory signals are used by the organism in the moment-tomoment guidance of dynamic behavior.Connections between brain activity and ongoing behavior are generally better understood in animals, in which the assaying of active behaviors is a necessity for studying learning and memory.* For the work reported here, one notable example is a phenomenon in rodents described by Muenzinger (13) and Tolman (7-9) that seems to relate memory processing and exploratory behavior. When learning to discriminate between two stimuli based on one item's selective associa...

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Hippocampal function in the rat: Cognitive mapping or vicarious trial and error?

Cited by 57 publications

References 49 publications

Relative Medial and Dorsal Cortex Volume in Relation to Foraging Ecology in Congeneric Lizards

Relative Medial and Dorsal Cortex Volume in Relation to Foraging Ecology in Congeneric Lizards

Altered Hippocampal Transcript Profile Accompanies an Age-Related Spatial Memory Deficit in Mice

Spontaneous revisitation during visual exploration as a link among strategic behavior, learning, and the hippocampus

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