Tag Archives: hippocampus

The hippocampus has brief but critical role in early task learning

Posted on September 4, 2020 by Amy McDermott

How the brain learns new tasks is among the biggest and oldest questions in neuroscience. A recent study in Nature Neuroscience offers a new, potentially key part of the answer: the dorsal hippocampus is involved in the earliest stages of … Continue reading →

Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Tagged Alzheimer's disease, chemogenetics, decision-making, dorsal hippocampus, hippocampus, learning, memory, neuron | Leave a comment

Future choices may be guided by our memories of past ones

Posted on July 17, 2020 by Jill Sakai

When it comes to making choices, past decisions may play a surprisingly large role. The traditional view of decision-making is that our choices are guided by what we remember about the outcomes of previous choices we’ve made. But in recent … Continue reading →

Neurons in the hippocampus can make several different maps of the same environment

Posted on April 17, 2020 by Amy McDermott

Nestled deep in the brain, the hippocampus is the seat of spatial cognition. Specialized hippocampal neurons fire in consistent patterns thought to construct mental maps that help us navigate the world—in general, researchers believed there was one map for every … Continue reading →

Categories: Journal Club | Neuroscience | Tagged hippocampus, map, navigation, neuron, place cell | Leave a comment