Distinct neuronal populations contribute to trace conditioning and extinction learning in the hippocampal CA1
Abstract
Trace conditioning and extinction learning depend on the hippocampus, but it remains unclear how neural activity in the hippocampus is modulated during these two different behavioral processes. To explore this question, we performed calcium imaging from a large number of individual CA1 neurons during both trace eye-blink conditioning and subsequent extinction learning in mice. Our findings reveal that distinct populations of CA1 cells contribute to trace conditioned learning versus extinction learning, as learning emerges. Furthermore, we examined network connectivity by calculating co-activity between CA1 neuron pairs and found that CA1 network connectivity patterns also differ between conditioning and extinction, even though the overall connectivity density remains constant. Together, our results demonstrate that distinct populations of hippocampal CA1 neurons, forming different sub-networks with unique connectivity patterns, encode different aspects of learning.
Data availability
All custom software will be made available on the Han Lab Github, and links are provided in the manuscript.All data generated during this study is included in the manuscript.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
National Science Foundation (CBET-1848029)
- Xue Han
National Institutes of Health (1R01MH122971-01A1,1R21MH109941-01)
- Xue Han
Boston University Dean's Catalyst Award
- Xue Han
National Academy of Engineering
- Xue Han
The Grainger Foundation, Inc.
- Xue Han
National Science Foundation (DGE-1247312)
- Kyle R Hansen
National Institutes of Health (F31 NS 105420)
- Kyle R Hansen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All animal procedures were approved by the Boston University Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (protocol #201800680), and all experiments were performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations.
Copyright
© 2021, Mount et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 2,872
- views
-
- 360
- downloads
-
- 16
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Neuroscience
Studying infant minds with movies is a promising way to increase engagement relative to traditional tasks. However, the spatial specificity and functional significance of movie-evoked activity in infants remains unclear. Here, we investigated what movies can reveal about the organization of the infant visual system. We collected fMRI data from 15 awake infants and toddlers aged 5–23 months who attentively watched a movie. The activity evoked by the movie reflected the functional profile of visual areas. Namely, homotopic areas from the two hemispheres responded similarly to the movie, whereas distinct areas responded dissimilarly, especially across dorsal and ventral visual cortex. Moreover, visual maps that typically require time-intensive and complicated retinotopic mapping could be predicted, albeit imprecisely, from movie-evoked activity in both data-driven analyses (i.e. independent component analysis) at the individual level and by using functional alignment into a common low-dimensional embedding to generalize across participants. These results suggest that the infant visual system is already structured to process dynamic, naturalistic information and that fine-grained cortical organization can be discovered from movie data.