Oral Presentation

Reward enhances reactivation of experience in the hippocampus
Experiences that lead to salient outcomes are more readily stored in memory. The hippocampus is required for storing memories of the places and events that make up these experiences. Although we might expect that salient outcomes would enhance memory storage, no neural mechanism has been found by which the outcome of an event enhances hippocampal memory formation for that event. Previous studies examining hippocampal responses to different outcomes have generally focused on the presence or absence of food reward. These studies report responses to reward that are similar to responses to other sorts of cues. Thus, there is currently no evidence for a change in hippocampal memory processing as a result of reward. Previous studies focused on place field activity, where hippocampal excitatory cells ('place cells') fire in particular locations in space during active exploration. Place cells are also active during high frequency network oscillations called sharp wave ripples (SWRs), in which sequences of cells active during running are often reactivated. Reactivation is thought to be important for long term memory formation, so we asked whether reward affects reactivation of experience in the hippocampus compared to no reward. We recorded from principal neurons in hippocampal area CA3 while animals learned to switch between two spatial sequences in response to changing reward contingencies. Here we show that hippocampal CA3 principal cells are much more active during SWRs at the end of rewarded as compared to unrewarded trajectories. This increased activation is strongest among cells that have place fields related to the rewarded location. At a population level, SWRs associated with reward preferentially activate pairs of CA3 place cells with overlapping place fields. The result is patterned CA3 activity consistent with the ordered replay of past and future trajectories seen in downstream hippocampal area CA1. These findings establish that information about the presence or the absence of a reward sculpts subsequent memory reactivation in the hippocampus. We propose this enhanced reactivation could be a general mechanism to encode experiences related to salient outcomes. More, generally this repetition of recent experience as a result of reward may help us understand how the hippocampus contributes to reinforcement learning.
Conference: Computational and systems neuroscience. Salt Lake City, UT, USA, February 26 - March 03, 2009.

Citation: Singer A and Frank L (2009). Reward enhances reactivation of experience in the hippocampus. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. Conference Abstract: Computational and systems neuroscience. doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.06.2009.03.303

Copyright: © 2009 Singer and Frank  This is an open-access publication subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence: Annabelle Singer, annabelle.singer@ucsf.edu
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