SCIENCE@home

Cellular tagging as a neural network mechanism for behavioural tagging

Masanori Nomoto,Noriaki Ohkawa,H. Nishizono,Jun Yokose,Akinobu Suzuki,Mina Matsuo,Shuhei Tsujimura,Y. Takahashi,Masashi Nagase,A. M. Watabe,F. Kato,K. Inokuchi

Published 2016 in Nature Communications

ABSTRACT

Behavioural tagging is the transformation of a short-term memory, induced by a weak experience, into a long-term memory (LTM) due to the temporal association with a novel experience. The mechanism by which neuronal ensembles, each carrying a memory engram of one of the experiences, interact to achieve behavioural tagging is unknown. Here we show that retrieval of a LTM formed by behavioural tagging of a weak experience depends on the degree of overlap with the neuronal ensemble corresponding to a novel experience. The numbers of neurons activated by weak training in a novel object recognition (NOR) task and by a novel context exploration (NCE) task, denoted as overlapping neurons, increases in the hippocampal CA1 when behavioural tagging is successfully achieved. Optical silencing of an NCE-related ensemble suppresses NOR–LTM retrieval. Thus, a population of cells recruited by NOR is tagged and then preferentially incorporated into the memory trace for NCE to achieve behavioural tagging. Short-term memories (STM) can become long-term memories when occurring alongside novel experiences. Here, the authors investigate the neural mechanisms behind such 'behavioural tagging' and find STM neural populations are preferentially incorporated into the ensembles encoding novel experiences.

PUBLICATION RECORD

CITATION MAP

EXTRACTION MAP

CLAIMS

  • No claims are published for this paper.

CONCEPTS

  • No concepts are published for this paper.

REFERENCES

Showing 1-49 of 49 references · Page 1 of 1

CITED BY

Showing 1-78 of 78 citing papers · Page 1 of 1