Learning and memory articles within Nature

Featured

  • Article |

    In the worm C. elegans, a previously unidentified pair of bilateral neurons in the male (termed MCMs) are shown to arise from differentiated glial cells upon sexual maturation; these neurons are essential for a male-specific form of associative learning which balances chemotactic responses with reproductive priorities.

    • Michele Sammut
    • , Steven J. Cook
    •  & Arantza Barrios

  • Letter |

    A new microendoscopic method reveals that hippocampal dendritic spines in the CA1 region undergo a complete turnover in less than six weeks in adult mice; this contrasts with the much greater stability of synapses in the neocortex and provides a physical basis for the fact that episodic memories are only retained by the mouse hippocampus for a few weeks.

    • Alessio Attardo
    • , James E. Fitzgerald
    •  & Mark J. Schnitzer

  • Article |

    Spatial working memory is known to involve the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus, but the specificities of the connection have been unclear; now, a direct path between these two areas is defined that is necessary for the encoding of spatial cues in mice, but is not required for the maintenance or retrieval of these cues.

    • Timothy Spellman
    • , Mattia Rigotti
    •  & Joshua A. Gordon

  • Letter |

    Neurons in the basolateral amygdala projecting to canonical fear or reward circuits undergo opposing changes in synaptic strength following fear or reward conditioning, and selectively activating these projection-target-defined neural populations causes either negative or positive reinforcement, respectively.

    • Praneeth Namburi
    • , Anna Beyeler
    •  & Kay M. Tye

  • Article |

    Ca2+ spikes are generated on different dendritic branches in the primary motor cortex of mice performing different motor learning tasks, causing long-lasting potentiation of postsynaptic dendritic spines; inactivation of a population of interneurons disrupts the spatial separation of Ca2+ spikes and persistent dendritic spine potentiation, suggesting that the generation of Ca2+ spikes on different dendritic branches is crucial for storing information in individual neurons.

    • Joseph Cichon
    •  & Wen-Biao Gan

  • Letter |

    Dissociating early from late fear memory retrieval in rats reveals that while the projection from the prelimbic prefrontal cortex to the amygdala is critical for fear memory retrieval at early time points, a separate circuit involving the paraventricular region of the dorsal midline thalamus is critical for fear memory retrieval at late time points, establishing the paraventricular region as a critical maintenance/retrieval node during the transition from short- to long-term fear memory.

    • Fabricio H. Do-Monte
    • , Kelvin Quiñones-Laracuente
    •  & Gregory J. Quirk

  • Letter |

    Inhibiting projections from the paraventricular nucleus of the thalamus to a specific division of the amygdala prevents fear conditioning in mice, indicating an important role for the thalamus–amygdala circuit in establishing and maintaining fear responses.

    • Mario A. Penzo
    • , Vincent Robert
    •  & Bo Li

  • Article |

    A study of freely moving bats provides new insights into how the brain encodes a three-dimensional neural compass; neurons were identified encoding the three Euler rotation angles of the head (azimuth, pitch, and roll) and recordings from these head-direction cells revealed a toroidal model of spatial orientation mapped out by cells tuned to two circular variables (azimuth × pitch).

    • Arseny Finkelstein
    • , Dori Derdikman
    •  & Nachum Ulanovsky

  • Letter |

    The authors identify a specific histone variant as a memory-suppressor that is initially reduced in expression within the hippocampus during memory formation; as a memory is consolidated to the cortex, reduced histone association with specific plasticity genes is observed, promoting stabilization of the memory.

    • Iva B. Zovkic
    • , Brynna S. Paulukaitis
    •  & J. David Sweatt

  • Letter |

    During learning, the new patterns of neural population activity that develop are constrained by the existing network structure so that certain patterns can be generated more readily than others.

    • Patrick T. Sadtler
    • , Kristin M. Quick
    •  & Aaron P. Batista

  • Letter |

    An optogenetic approach in mice was used to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying memory valence association; dentate gyrus, but not amygdala, memory engram cells exhibit plasticity in valence associations, suggesting that emotional memory associations can be changed at the circuit level.

    • Roger L. Redondo
    • , Joshua Kim
    •  & Susumu Tonegawa

  • Letter |

    A rodent study using optogenetics to induce long-term potentiation and long-term depression provides a causal link between synaptic plasticity and memory.

    • Sadegh Nabavi
    • , Rocky Fox
    •  & Roberto Malinow

  • Article |

    Plasticity within neuronal microcircuits is believed to be the substrate of learning, and this study identifies two distinct disinhibitory mechanisms involving interactions between PV+ and SOM+ interneurons that dynamically regulate principal neuron activity in the amygdala and thereby control auditory fear learning.

    • Steffen B. E. Wolff
    • , Jan Gründemann
    •  & Andreas Lüthi

  • Letter |

    Inhibitory neuron activity is found to be relatively stable during motor learning whereas excitatory neuron activity is much more dynamic — the results indicate that a large number of neurons exhibit activity changes early on during motor learning, but this population is refined with subsequent practice.

    • Andrew J. Peters
    • , Simon X. Chen
    •  & Takaki Komiyama

  • Letter |

    Simultaneous recordings from hippocampus and entorhinal cortex in rats show that as the animals learn odour guidance cues during their exploration of two-dimensional space in the laboratory, ensembles of coherently firing neurons emerge in both locations, with cortical–hippocampal oscillatory coupling occurring in a specific range of the beta-gamma frequency band.

    • Kei M. Igarashi
    • , Li Lu
    •  & Edvard I. Moser

  • Letter |

    CA2 neuron inactivation leads to a severe deficit in social memory, while having little effect on other well-known hippocampal functions such as contextual or spatial memory.

    • Frederick L. Hitti
    •  & Steven A. Siegelbaum

  • Letter |

    In adult mouse hippocampus, a learning-associated plasticity mechanism may exist that depends on the configuration of parvalbumin(PV)-expressing basket cell networks; trial and error learning initially promotes a higher fraction of cells with low PV expression, whereas learning completion promotes a higher fraction of cells with high PV expression, and these opposite configurations modulate learning and the underlying structural plasticity.

    • Flavio Donato
    • , Santiago Belluco Rompani
    •  & Pico Caroni

  • Letter |

    Single-unit recordings and optogenetic manipulations in mice undergoing auditory fear conditioning show that fear expression is related to the phasic inhibition of prefrontal cortex (PFC) parvalbumin interneurons; inhibition disinhibits PFC projection neurons and synchronizes their firing, leading to fear expression.

    • Julien Courtin
    • , Fabrice Chaudun
    •  & Cyril Herry

  • Letter |

    Cyclic voltammetry reveals an extended mode of reward-predictive dopamine signalling in the striatum as rats navigate; signals increase as the rats approach distant rewards, instead of showing phasic or steady tonic activity, and the increases scale flexibly with the distance and size of the rewards.

    • Mark W. Howe
    • , Patrick L. Tierney
    •  & Ann M. Graybiel

  • Letter |

    A pair of Drosophila brain cells is identified and its activation alone is found to induce the fly’s complete feeding motor routine when artificially induced; suppressing or ablating these two neurons eliminates the sugar-induced feeding behaviour, but ablation of just one neuron results in asymmetric movements.

    • Thomas F. Flood
    • , Shinya Iguchi
    •  & Motojiro Yoshihara

  • Outlook |

    One of sleep's most important functions is processing memory. Researchers are now starting to figure out how the brain helps us learn when we're asleep.

    • Kerri Smith

  • Article |

    It is known that compressed sequences of hippocampal place cells can ‘replay’ previous navigational trajectories in linearly constrained mazes; here, rat place-cell sequences representing two-dimensional spatial trajectories were observed before navigational decisions, and predicted the immediate navigational path.

    • Brad E. Pfeiffer
    •  & David J. Foster

  • Article |

    Intracellular membrane potential changes are measured directly in mouse grid cells during navigation along linear tracks in virtual reality; the recordings reveal that slow ramps of depolarization are the sub-threshold signatures of firing fields, as in attractor network models of grid cells, whereas theta oscillations pace action potential timing.

    • Cristina Domnisoru
    • , Amina A. Kinkhabwala
    •  & David W. Tank

  • Letter |

    It was proposed that protein kinase M-ζ (PKM-ζ) is a key factor in long-term potentiation (LTP) and memory maintenance on the basis of the disruption of LTP and memory by inhibitors of PKM-ζ; however, here mice that do not express PKM-ζ are shown to have normal LTP and memory, thus casting doubts on a critical role for PKM-ζ in these processes.

    • Lenora J. Volk
    • , Julia L. Bachman
    •  & Richard L. Huganir

  • Letter |

    Genetically removing PKM-ζ in mice has no effect on memory, and despite absence of this kinase, the original peptide inhibitor of PKM-ζ still disrupts memory in these mutant mice; these data re-open the exploration for key molecules regulating maintenance of long-term plasticity processes.

    • Anna M. Lee
    • , Benjamin R. Kanter
    •  & Robert O. Messing

  • Article |

    Simultaneous electrophysiological recordings in hippocampus and neural-activity-triggered whole-brain imaging in the monkey show that most of the cerebral cortex is activated during the fast hippocampal oscillations (ripples), whereas most diencephalic, midbrain and brainstem regions are inhibited; this may function to optimize information transfer from hippocampus to cortex during off-line memory consolidation.

    • N. K. Logothetis
    • , O. Eschenko
    •  & A. Oeltermann

  • Letter |

    Dopamine is synonymous with reward in mammals but associated with aversive reinforcement in insects, where reward seems to be signalled by octopamine; here it is shown that flies have discrete populations of dopamine neurons representing positive or negative values that are coordinately regulated by octopamine.

    • Christopher J. Burke
    • , Wolf Huetteroth
    •  & Scott Waddell

  • Letter |

    Young male fruitflies learn to avoid futile courtship of non-virgin females because the latter are scented with the male pheromone cis-vaccenyl acetate; this behaviour results from an increase in the males’ innate sensitivity for the pheromone and is controlled by a small set of dopaminergic neurons.

    • Krystyna Keleman
    • , Eleftheria Vrontou
    •  & Barry J. Dickson

  • Letter |

    A group of dopamine neurons that are distinct from those mediating aversive reinforcement is found to signal sugar reward in the fly brain, highlighting the evolutionarily conserved function of dopamine neurons in reward processing.

    • Chang Liu
    • , Pierre-Yves Plaçais
    •  & Hiromu Tanimoto

  • Letter |

    In Bengalese finches, a basal ganglia circuit, the anterior forebrain pathway, can covertly acquire the ability to adaptively modify song without contributing to song production during practice or training.

    • Jonathan D. Charlesworth
    • , Timothy L. Warren
    •  & Michael S. Brainard

  • Article |

    Genetically encoded neural activity markers were used in mice to simultaneously follow large populations of motor cortex neurons during sensorimotor learning, revealing that spatially intermingled neurons represent either sensory or motor behaviour, with population-level representations of subsets of motor programs strengthening as training progressed.

    • D. Huber
    • , D. A. Gutnisky
    •  & K. Svoboda

  • News & Views |

    After training, animals and humans can make their thoughts interact directly with computers. A study provides evidence that the corticostriatal system of the brain is essential for this learning process.

    • David T. Blake

Browse broader subjects

Browse narrower subjects

Browse Learning and memory across other nature.com journals