Optogenetic inhibition of either the anterior or posterior retrosplenial cortex disrupts retrieval of a trace, but not delay, fear memory. Neurobiol Learn Mem 2021 Nov;185:107530
Date
10/01/2021Pubmed ID
34592468Pubmed Central ID
PMC8595712DOI
10.1016/j.nlm.2021.107530Scopus ID
2-s2.0-85118748947 (requires institutional sign-in at Scopus site) 9 CitationsAbstract
Previous work investigating the role of the retrosplenial cortex (RSC) in memory formation has demonstrated that its contributions are not uniform throughout the rostro-caudal axis. While the anterior region was necessary for encoding CS information in a trace conditioning procedure, the posterior retrosplenial cortex was needed to encode contextual information. Using the same behavioral procedure, we tested if there was a similar dissociation during memory retrieval. First, we found that memory retrieval following trace conditioning results in increased neural activity in both the anterior and posterior retrosplenial cortex, measured using the immediate early gene zif268. Similar increases were not found in either RSC subregion using a delay conditioning task. We then found that optogenetic inhibition of neural activity in either subregion impairs retrieval of a trace, but not delay, memory. Together these results add to a growing literature showing a role for the retrosplenial cortex in memory formation and retention. Further, they suggest that following formation, memory storage becomes distributed to a wider network than is needed for its initial consolidation.
Author List
Trask S, Ferrara NC, Grisales K, Helmstetter FJAuthor
Fred Helmstetter PhD Professor in the Psychology / Neuroscience department at University of Wisconsin - MilwaukeeMESH terms used to index this publication - Major topics in bold
AnimalsConditioning, Classical
Fear
Fluorescent Antibody Technique
Gyrus Cinguli
Male
Mental Recall
Optogenetics
Rats
Rats, Long-Evans
