General Biology Seminar

One of the key questions of cognitive neuroscience is how the brain constructs high-order representations of experience and how those representations are stored and recalled as conscious memories. Place cells of the hippocampus are an outstanding model system for deciphering the neural network mechanisms by which the brain constructs these cognitive representations from multimodal input. Converging anatomical, behavioral, and physiological evidence suggests that there are two parallel processing streams that convey different types of information into the hippocampus. One stream conveys spatial information to the hippocampus via the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) grid cell system. The second stream conveys nonspatial information via the lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC). The hippocampus is thought to combine these streams and create conjunctive representations of the spatial and nonspatial information (e.g., object in place, event in context) that are necessary for hippocampus-dependent contextual learning and episodic memory.