Document Type
Article
Abstract
The hippocampus is critical to the temporal organization of our experiences. Although this fundamental capacity is conserved across modalities and species, its underlying neuronal mechanisms remain unclear. Here we recorded hippocampal activity as rats remembered an extended sequence of nonspatial events unfolding over several seconds, as in daily life episodes in humans. We then developed statistical machine learning methods to analyze the ensemble activity and discovered forms of sequential organization and coding important for order memory judgments. Specifically, we found that hippocampal ensembles provide significant temporal coding throughout nonspatial event sequences, differentiate distinct types of task-critical information sequentially within events, and exhibit theta-associated reactivation of the sequential relationships among events. We also demonstrate that nonspatial event representations are sequentially organized within individual theta cycles and precess across successive cycles. These findings suggest a fundamental function of the hippocampal network is to encode, preserve, and predict the sequential order of experiences.
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Publication Info
Published in Nature Communications, Volume 13, 2022, pages 787-.
Rights
© The Author(s) 2022
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
APA Citation
Shahbaba, B., Li, L., Agostinelli, F., Saraf, M., Cooper, K. W., Haghverdian, D., Elias, G. A., Baldi, P., & Fortin, N. J. (2022). Hippocampal ensembles represent sequential relationships among an extended sequence of nonspatial events. Nature Communications, 13. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-28057-6