CNLM Colloquium Series

Join the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM) for a hybrid event featuring Dr. Elizabeth A. Buffalo, professor and chair of physiology and biophysics at the University of Washington.

This event will be held in-person in the Herklotz Conference Center and virtually via Zoom.

Neural Dynamics of Memory Formation in the Primate Hippocampus 

Description: 

Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Millner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial representations are present in the primate brain and how to reconcile these representations with the known mnemonic function of this region. I will discuss a series of experiments that have examined neural activity in the hippocampus in monkeys performing behavioral tasks including foraging and spatial memory tasks in a virtual environment. These data demonstrate that behavioral task structure has a significant influence on hippocampal activity, with neurons responding to all salient events within the task. Taken together, these data are consistent with the idea that activity in the hippocampus tracks ongoing experience in support of memory formation.