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Phylogeny of neocortical-hippocampal projections provides insight in the nature of human memory

  1. Daniel Reznik author has email address
  2. Piotr Majka
  3. Marcello GP Rosa
  4. Menno P Witter
  5. Christian F Doeller
  1. Department of Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany
  2. Laboratory of Neuroinformatics, Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland
  3. Department of Physiology and Neuroscience Program, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Australia
  4. Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex, KG. Jebsen Centre for Alzheimer’s Disease, NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway
  5. Wilhelm Wundt Institute of Psychology, Leipzig University, Leipzig, Germany
  6. Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, Dresden, Germany

Peer review process

Not revised: This Reviewed Preprint includes the authors’ original preprint (without revision), an eLife assessment, and public reviews.

Read more about eLife’s peer review process.

Editors

  • Reviewing Editor
    Alyssa Wilson
    Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, United States of America
  • Senior Editor
    Laura Colgin
    University of Texas at Austin, Austin, United States of America

Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

The paper itself has a reasonable aim, to compare the inputs to the hippocampus from cortical regions across mammals. But for some reason, the conclusions that are reached are very limited. We know for example that the main laboratory rodents investigated, rats and mice, are nocturnal, live in underground tunnels, and have a very wide field of view with no fovea. In contrast, primates have a highly developed cortical system for vision and a fovea, and so have very different capabilities to rodents, as they have an ability to identify people or objects at a distance, and to remember where they have been seen. Despite this major difference in the visual cortical processing in these different mammals, somehow important points are missed in this paper about how the cortical processing is organised in these different mammals, and how this is reflected in the anatomy.

Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

Summary:

The manuscript emphasizes a phylogenetic conservation of the hippocampal region and primary sensory cortical regions in mammalian species. The authors then propose that the evident species-specific differences in behavior and memory-related functions may be due to differences in type and amount of cortico-hippocampal connectivity.

Strengths:

The authors are well-established researchers with a long history of excellent results and publications. The question (co-influence of cortical and hippocampal connections) is potentially interesting.

Weaknesses:

The treatment is very broad and macro scale, ignoring the likelihood that hippocampal-cortical connectivity and behavioral outcomes result from multiple differences at a more micro-scale. The designated "mammalian" sample is also broad. Thus, it can appear incomplete as a sample, and incompletely discussed.

  1. Howard Hughes Medical Institute
  2. Wellcome Trust
  3. Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
  4. Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation