Loading Events

« All Events

Thesis defense – Alena Spitsyn

Friday 11 July / 14:30

Venue: Centre Broca

Defense in English


Alena Spitsyn
Team Olfaction and memory
IINS

Thesis supervisor: Lisa Roux

Title

Beyond social memories: hippocampal CA2 activity when navigating for rewards

Abstract

Animals’ survival largely depends on their ability to learn and remember how to navigate towards sites of interest such as food locations or home. The hippocampus is a key brain structure for spatial memory. Hippocampal place cells fire at discrete locations (their place fields) as subjects move through their environment, thereby providing a neural code for current location during locomotion. However, in the CA1 region of the hippocampus, this cognitive spatial map is not homogeneous: several studies indicate that place fields tend to accumulate next to salient cues such as rewards, a process called “goal-oriented remapping”. The mechanisms underlying the establishment of this “biased” map are very little understood. Moreover, whether the often overlooked CA2 region of the hippocampus also presents such map goal-oriented bias and/or contributes to CA1 remapping is unknown.

The goal of this PhD project was to characterize the activity of the CA2 region during spatial navigation towards rewards and during reward consumption to test the hypothesis that it participates in biasing the hippocampal cognitive towards salient locations.

Keywords

memory, hippocampus, reward, spatial navigation, electrophysiology

Publication

Maïthé Loisy, Guillaume Bouisset, Sebastien Lopez, Maud Muller, Alena Spitsyn, Jeanne Duval, Rebecca Ann Piskorowski, Laure Verret, Vivien Chevaleyre (2022) Sequential inhibitory plasticities in hippocampal area CA2 and social memory formation. Neuron Vol110, I17

Jury

  • Lisa ROUX
  • Azahara OLIVA
  • Stéphanie TROUCHE
  • François GEORGES
  • Rebecca Ann PISKOROWSKI
  • Tristan STÖBER
I subscribe to the newsletter:

Details

Date:
Friday 11 July
Time:
14:30
Event Categories:
,