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Memory

The foundations of accurate recall

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 12, pages 372–373 (2011)Cite this article

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First, the authors examined green fluorescent protein-labelled large mossy fibre terminals (LMTs) in mouse hippocampus following a hippocampus-dependent task — either contextual fear conditioning or spatial learning in the Morris water maze. In each case, they found a significant increase in the number of filopodia and putative presynaptic sites in LMTs. These filopodia made synaptic contact with parvalbumin-positive GABAergic interneurons, suggesting that they trigger feedforward inhibition. The authors observed similar structural rearrangements and feedforward inhibitory connectivity in the cerebellum following tasks that involve cerebellar circuits (cued fear conditioning and the rotarod test).

Interestingly, the extent of filopodial growth was strongly correlated with the precision of the reference memory of the platform position in the Morris water maze task. Moreover, in fear conditioning tasks, the filopodia were eventually lost and the fear memory became generalized (that is, mice exhibited a freezing response to unrelated neutral contexts in addition to the specific, learnt response) with time, but retrieval of the memory for the appropriate context re-induced filopodial growth and memory precision. Memory recall following contextual fear conditioning was also associated with strong c-FOS signals in CA3b pyramidal neurons, highlighting the specificity of this learning-related feedforward inhibition.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPER

  1. Ruediger, S. et al. Learning-related feedforward inhibitory connectivity growth required for memory precision. Nature 1 May 2011 (doi:10.1038/nature09946)

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  1. Monica Hoyos Flight
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Flight, M. The foundations of accurate recall. Nat Rev Neurosci 12, 372–373 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn3055

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