The Retrosplenial Cortical Role in Delayed Spatial Alternation.

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) plays an important role in spatial cognition. RSC neurons exhibit a variety of spatial firing patterns and lesion studies have found that the RSC is necessary for spatial working memory tasks. However, little is known about how RSC neurons might encode spatial memory during a delay period. In the present study, we trained control rats and rats with excitotoxic lesions of the RSC on spatial alternation task with varying delay durations and in a separate group of rats, we recorded RSC neuronal activity as the rats performed the alternation task. We found that RSC lesions significantly impaired alternation performance, particularly at the longest delay duration. We also found that RSC neurons exhibited reliably different firing patterns throughout the delay periods preceding left and right trials, consistent with a working memory signal. These differential firing patterns were absent during the delay periods preceding errors. We also found that many RSC neurons exhibit a large spike in firing rate leading up to the start of the trial. Many of these trial start responses also differentiated left and right trials, suggesting that they could play a role in priming the 'go left' or 'go right' behavioral responses. Our results suggest that these firing patterns represent critical memory information that underlies the RSC role in spatial working memory.

A comparison of hippocampal and retrosplenial cortical spatial and contextual firing patterns.

The hippocampus (HPC) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) are key components of the brain's memory and navigation systems. Lesions of either region produce profound deficits in spatial cognition and HPC neurons exhibit well-known spatial firing patterns (place fields). Recent studies have also identified an array of navigation-related firing patterns in the RSC. However, there has been little work comparing the response properties and information coding mechanisms of these two brain regions. In the present study, we examined the firing patterns of HPC and RSC neurons in two tasks which are commonly used to study spatial cognition in rodents, open field foraging with an environmental context manipulation and continuous T-maze alternation. We found striking similarities in the kinds of spatial and contextual information encoded by these two brain regions. Neurons in both regions carried information about the rat's current spatial location, trajectories and goal locations, and both regions reliably differentiated the contexts. However, we also found several key differences. For example, information about head direction was a prominent component of RSC representations but was only weakly encoded in the HPC. The two regions also used different coding schemes, even when they encoded the same kind of information. As expected, the HPC employed a sparse coding scheme characterized by compact, high contrast place fields, and information about spatial location was the dominant component of HPC representations. RSC firing patterns were more consistent with a distributed coding scheme. Instead of compact place fields, RSC neurons exhibited broad, but reliable, spatial and directional tuning, and they typically carried information about multiple navigational variables. The observed similarities highlight the closely related functions of the HPC and RSC, whereas the differences in information types and coding schemes suggest that these two regions likely make somewhat different contributions to spatial cognition.

Time Cells in the Retrosplenial Cortex.

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is a key component of the brain's memory systems, with anatomical connections to the hippocampus, anterior thalamus, and entorhinal cortex. This circuit has been implicated in episodic memory and many of these structures have been shown to encode temporal information, which is critical for episodic memory. For example, hippocampal time cells reliably fire during specific segments of time during a delay period. Although RSC lesions are known to disrupt temporal memory, time cells have not been observed there. In the present study, we examined the firing patterns of RSC neurons during the intertrial delay period of two behavioral tasks, a blocked alternation task and a cued T-maze task. For the blocked alternation task, rats were required to approach the east or west arm of a plus maze for reward during different blocks of trials. Because the reward locations were not cued, the rat had to remember the goal location for each trial. In the cued T-maze task, the reward location was explicitly cued with a light and the rats simply had to approach the light for reward, so there was no requirement to hold a memory during the intertrial delay. Time cells were prevalent in the blocked alternation task, and most time cells clearly differentiated the east and west trials. We also found that RSC neurons could exhibit off-response time fields, periods of reliably inhibited firing. Time cells were also observed in the cued T-maze, but they were less prevalent and they did not differentiate left and right trials as well as in the blocked alternation task, suggesting that RSC time cells are sensitive to the memory demands of the task. These results suggest that temporal coding is a prominent feature of RSC firing patterns, consistent with an RSC role in episodic memory.

The limbic memory circuit and the neural basis of contextual memory.

The hippocampus, retrosplenial cortex and anterior thalamus are key components of a neural circuit known to be involved in a variety of memory functions, including spatial, contextual and episodic memory. In this review, we focus on the role of this circuit in contextual memory processes. The background environment, or context, is a powerful cue for memory retrieval, and neural representations of the context provide a mechanism for efficiently retrieving relevant memories while avoiding interference from memories that belong to other contexts. Data from experimental lesions and neural manipulation techniques indicate that each of these regions is critical for contextual memory. Neurophysiological evidence from the hippocampus and retrosplenial cortex suggest that contextual information is represented within this circuit by population-level neural firing patterns that reliably differentiate each context a subject encounters. These findings indicate that encoding contextual information to support context-dependent memory retrieval is a key function of this circuit.