Huelin Gorriz, Marta;
(2021)
The role of experience in memory consolidation.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
The hippocampus is believed to play a key role in long-term consolidation during sleep. Additionally, hippocampal place cells - pyramidal neurons that fire in discrete locations in the space - have been used as a reliable behavioural correlate to study learning and memory of spatial tasks. To date, most studies investigating memory consolidation focus on recordings from neural data obtained during tasks the subjects have been previously overexposed to. While this strategy guarantees a higher stability of the spatial map encoding for that specific experience, the reality of more naturalistic settings is that both humans and other animals can encounter multiple events of diverse duration and relevance on a daily basis. Yet, it remains unclear how the brain prioritizes and successfully stores multiple novel events. To address this question, we exposed a group of rats to pairs of novel linear tracks across different days. Each day, rats were allowed to run in each track for a different fixed number of laps, and the experience was preceded and followed by a sleep session. We found that the hippocampus was able to discriminate the different spatial maps even for short exposures with unstable place fields. We also observed awake and sleep hippocampal replay of all tracks regardless of the stability of their spatial representations. However, when presented with similar experiences of different duration in the novel tracks, the hippocampus prioritised the consolidation of the longer experience if the spatial representation of the shorter one was still unstable. Finally, we found that both awake hippocampal replay and theta sequences influenced the levels of subsequent sleep replay. These results aim to add further understanding of how experience shapes the encoding of different spatial trajectories, and how offline activity contributes to the consolidation of their memory representations.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | The role of experience in memory consolidation |
| Event: | UCL (University College London) |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > Div of Psychology and Lang Sciences > Experimental Psychology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10135600 |
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