Overlap among Spatial Memories Triggers Repulsion of Hippocampal Representations.

ABSTRACT: Across the domains of spatial navigation and episodic memory, the hippocampus is thought to play a critical role in disambiguating (pattern separating) representations of overlapping events. However, it is not fully understood how and why hippocampal patterns become separated. Here, we test the idea that event overlap triggers a "repulsion" among hippocampal representations that develops over the course of learning. Using a naturalistic route-learning paradigm and spatiotemporal pattern analysis of human fMRI data, we found that hippocampal representations of overlapping routes gradually diverged with learning to the point that they became less similar than representations of non-overlapping events. In other words, the hippocampus not only disambiguated overlapping events but formed repres

SUBMITTER: Chanales AJH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5576038 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature