Learning and memory articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article
    | Open Access

    The contribution of visual experience to the formation of cognitive maps in humans is not well understood. Here, the authors show using fMRI and an imagined navigation paradigm, that sighted people display hexagonal grid-like neural coding, while blind people show neural representations consistent with a square grid.

    • Federica Sigismondi
    • , Yangwen Xu
    •  & Roberto Bottini

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The dorsal hippocampus plays an important role for spatial memory, but how its outputs guide behavior is not fully understood. Here, the authors show that nucleus accumbens-specific hippocampal projection neurons carry a highly conjunctive code of spatial and action information that directs spatial reward memory-guided appetitive behaviors.

    • Oliver Barnstedt
    • , Petra Mocellin
    •  & Stefan Remy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Successful memorization could be decoded from brain activity. Here the authors decode human memory success from EEG recordings, suggesting memory is linked to context.

    • Yuxuan Li
    • , Jesse K. Pazdera
    •  & Michael J. Kahana

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Long noncoding RNAs (lncRNAs) function in many processes yet their participation in learning is largely unknown. Here, we identify and characterize the lncRNA SLAMR, which is recruited to stimulated synapses to mediate structural plasticity during experience and fear memory consolidation.

    • Isabel Espadas
    • , Jenna L. Wingfield
    •  & Sathyanarayanan Puthanveettil

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Early life experience contributes to behaviour in later life. Here the authors show in rats, that the infant brain, during a critical period, forms lasting memories of the spatial context of experiences; in adulthood, these memories involving medial prefrontal cortex improve spatial abilities in similar contexts.

    • María P. Contreras
    • , Marta Mendez
    •  & Marion Inostroza

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Discriminating threat from safety is critical for humans to navigate their environment. Here, the authors show that neural representations of threat and safety are distributed across brain systems that are robustly decoded across threat paradigms.

    • Zhenfu Wen
    • , Edward F. Pace-Schott
    •  & Mohammed R. Milad

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Current approaches possibly cannot unambiguously distinguish the unique contributions of feedback inhibition versus feedforward inhibition to oscillatory events. Here authors show that a loss of CA1 pyramidal cell transmission, resulting in feedback inhibition reduction, leads to spatially triggered high-frequency oscillatory events; these events were like place cells in their spatial extent and localized to small regions in CA1.

    • Chinnakkaruppan Adaikkan
    • , Justin Joseph
    •  & Thomas J. McHugh

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Specific gamma frequency oscillations are supposed to differentially route information within the hippocampal formation. Here, the authors show that while hippocampal gamma oscillations are more diverse than previously reported, this variability is modulated by behavior and learning.

    • Vincent Douchamps
    • , Matteo di Volo
    •  & Romain Goutagny

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) is hypothesized to function as a cognitive map for memory-guided navigation. Here, the authors demonstrate that the establishment of a spatially consistent MEC map across learning correlates with, and is necessary for, successful spatial memory.

    • Taylor J. Malone
    • , Nai-Wen Tien
    •  & Yi Gu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How neural responses to boundaries develop in the subiculum remains unknown. Here authors show that the receptive fields of Boundary Vector Cells (neurons signalling vector displacement to boundaries) are altered by environment geometry, with directional tunings aligning with square arena walls, including during development.

    • Laurenz Muessig
    • , Fabio Ribeiro Rodrigues
    •  & Thomas J. Wills

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The developmental trajectory of hippocampal ripples, the electrical signature of long term memory storage, is poorly understood. Here, the authors show that their delayed appearance is mechanistically linked to the maturation of inhibition.

    • Irina Pochinok
    • , Tristan M. Stöber
    •  & Ileana L. Hanganu-Opatz

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How functional neuronal circuits are established during development is not fully understood. Here the authors show, by raising fish in the dark and under anesthesia, that brain activity is not needed for the development of complex, decision-making circuits.

    • Dániel L. Barabási
    • , Gregor F. P. Schuhknecht
    •  & Florian Engert

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural dynamics of emotional memory consolidation are not well understood. Here, the authors analyse intracranial recordings from human participants after emotional memory encoding, showing that ripple-locked activity in the amygdala and hippocampus is predictive of subsequent memory.

    • Haoxin Zhang
    • , Ivan Skelin
    •  & Jack J. Lin

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Dopamine release in the brain is hypothesised to be related to unexpected changes in reward. Here, the authors combine PET and fMRI in humans to show individual differences in reward prediction error during a card guessing game are associated with dopamine receptor occupancy in the striatum.

    • Filip Grill
    • , Marc Guitart-Masip
    •  & Anna Rieckmann

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How brain regions communicate to support the learning and recall of rich memories is not fully understood. Using recordings of electrical activity deep within the brains of human patients, the authors discovered a role for the theta rhythm in allowing this bidirectional dialogue across brain regions to happen.

    • Sandra Gattas
    • , Myra Sarai Larson
    •  & Michael A. Yassa

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How physiological memories are encoded is not fully understood. Here the authors show how physiological memories of aversive and appetitive experience are represented by corticotropin-releasing hormone synthesizing neurons in the paraventricular nucleus of the hypothalamus and demonstrate that behavioral readouts may not accurately reflect physiological changes invoked by the memory of salient experiences.

    • Tamás Füzesi
    • , Neilen P. Rasiah
    •  & Jaideep S. Bains

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The memory function of sleep relies on the coordination of slow oscillations and spindles. Here the authors show that respiration is associated with the emergence and interplay of these sleep rhythms, and that this coupling is linked to memory reactivation.

    • Thomas Schreiner
    • , Marit Petzka
    •  & Bernhard P. Staresina

  • Article
    | Open Access

    While memory consolidation involves repeated reactivation of past memory traces, it is not fully understood how the brain prioritizes memories for long-term storage during sleep. Here the authors recorded from hippocampal place cells in rats, and find that a novel experience with a longer duration is prioritized for consolidation.

    • Marta Huelin Gorriz
    • , Masahiro Takigawa
    •  & Daniel Bendor

  • Article
    | Open Access

    It has been proposed that the amygdala is required for the familiarity aspect of item recognition. By studying the performance of monkeys with selective amygdala lesions on four converging memory paradigms, the authors demonstrate that the amygdala is not necessary for familiarity memory, but confirm its role in reward processing.

    • Benjamin M. Basile
    • , Vincent D. Costa
    •  & Elisabeth A. Murray

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Previous work has identified cells in L2/3 of auditory cortex which strongly respond with bursting to a specific learned chord, but not to single component tones in an auditory task. Here the authors show that these cells correlate with the behavioral relevance of the learned composite sounds.

    • Ruijie Li
    • , Junjie Huang
    •  & Hongbo Jia

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Synaptic activity controls the extinction of conditioned fear. Here the authors discovered a new way that the brain controls memories of fear: a long noncoding RNA called Gas5 that coordinates the activity of RNA granules in the synaptic compartment.

    • Wei-Siang Liau
    • , Qiongyi Zhao
    •  & Timothy W. Bredy

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The neural mechanisms underlying the effects of aging on executive functioning remain unclear. Here, the authors show neurons in the young mouse medial prefrontal cortex show cross-modal memory coding, however this declines in middle and old age, along with resting state functional connectivity in the region.

    • Huee Ru Chong
    • , Yadollah Ranjbar-Slamloo
    •  & Tsukasa Kamigaki

  • Article
    | Open Access

    In fly, one-cycle aversive conditioning-induced choice bias decays in 24 h. Here, authors found the memory of one-cycle aversive conditioning remains in the brain, between KCab and MBON-a3, and is retrievable by a second mild retraining.

    • Chih-Ming Wang
    • , Chun-Yuan Wu
    •  & Hsueh-Cheng Chiang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Lesions of dorsomedial, but not dorsolateral, striatum are associated with working memory impairments. Here, the authors investigate the role of a projection from medial prefrontal cortex to dorsomedial striatum in the maintenance of information during a working memory task in mice.

    • Maria Wilhelm
    • , Yaroslav Sych
    •  & Fritjof Helmchen

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How learning refines the coordinated activitity of neurons across multiple regions of the mouse cortex remains unclear. Here, the authors identified the emergence of cortical subnetworks during learning of a sensorimotor task.

    • Xin Wei Chia
    • , Jian Kwang Tan
    •  & Hiroshi Makino

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How fearful events are represented in the hippocampus remains unclear. Here, the authors describe aversive stimulus-triggered single neuron and population responses as well as alterations of the spatial code in the dorsal hippocampal CA1 region.

    • Albert M. Barth
    • , Marta Jelitai
    •  & Viktor Varga

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The thalamic nucleus reuniens coordinates oscillations between the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex during emotional memory retrieval. Here the authors show that theta-paced optogenetic stimulation of this network can suppress the retrieval of aversive memories and prevent fear relapse after extinction.

    • Michael S. Totty
    • , Tuğçe Tuna
    •  & Stephen Maren

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Changes in people’s external environments lead to the segmentation of experience into discrete memories, or episodes. Here, the authors show that dynamic fluctuations in internal states, namely musically elicited emotions, also shape the episodic structure of memories.

    • Mason McClay
    • , Matthew E. Sachs
    •  & David Clewett

  • Article
    | Open Access

    How and to what extent oligodendrocytes (OLs) contribute to learning and cognition is not well understood. Here, the authors show that the performance of mice in working memory-dependent cognitive tasks depends on OL genesis and is proportional to the number of OL precursors and OLs generated during training.

    • Takahiro Shimizu
    • , Stuart G. Nayar
    •  & William D. Richardson

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Memories are transformed over time. Here, the authors show that this transformation is semantic in nature and linked to transformed event representations in neocortex and increased pattern reinstatement in the posterior hippocampus, while they find no credible evidence for a perceptual transformation.

    • Valentina Krenz
    • , Arjen Alink
    •  & Lars Schwabe

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