BMC Seminar Thursday 5 November at 12:00 in Árnagarður in room 301
Title: Mechanisms underlying memory precision
Speaker: Erika Atucha, Assistant professor, Faculty of Medicine, School of Life Sciences, University of Iceland
Abstract: As the global population continues to age, cognitive impairments impose an increasing burden on individuals and society. These impairments are deeply rooted in episodic memory deficits, which serve as the hallmark of age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. This cognitive deterioration is closely linked to the vulnerability of specific neural substrates during aging, specifically the hippocampus and its projections within the medial temporal lobe, particularly the perforant pathway. However, the precise neural and molecular substrates within the hippocampus that support the precision of memories of daily life experiences remain to be fully elucidated. To address this gap, I established a novel dual-event behavioral task in rodents to investigate event boundary formation between similar experiences and its contribution to long-term memory. Using this paradigm, I identified critical memory consolidation mechanisms required to recall distinct memories of similar experiences. Specifically, these processes rely on epigenetic- and microRNA-134-dependent pathways within the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. Together, these findings suggest a functional segregation among the perforant pathway projections within the hippocampus, wherein the indirect pathway enables the separation of similar memories, while the direct pathway is essential for their binding, leading to gist-like memory representations.
