Hippocampal Offline Reactivation Consolidates Recently Formed Cell Assembly Patterns during Sharp Wave-Ripples - PubMed (original) (raw)

Hippocampal Offline Reactivation Consolidates Recently Formed Cell Assembly Patterns during Sharp Wave-Ripples

Gido M van de Ven et al. Neuron. 2016.

Abstract

The ability to reinstate neuronal assemblies representing mnemonic information is thought to require their consolidation through offline reactivation during sleep/rest. To test this, we detected cell assembly patterns formed by repeated neuronal co-activations in the mouse hippocampus during exploration of spatial environments. We found that the reinstatement of assembly patterns representing a novel, but not a familiar, environment correlated with their offline reactivation and was impaired by closed-loop optogenetic disruption of sharp wave-ripple oscillations. Moreover, we discovered that reactivation was only required for the reinstatement of assembly patterns whose expression was gradually strengthened during encoding of a novel place. The context-dependent reinstatement of assembly patterns whose expression did not gain in strength beyond the first few minutes of spatial encoding was not dependent on reactivation. This demonstrates that the hippocampus can hold concurrent representations of space that markedly differ in their encoding dynamics and their dependence on offline reactivation for consolidation. VIDEO ABSTRACT.

Copyright © 2016 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Figures

Figure 1

Figure 1

Short-Timescale Hippocampal Co-firing Patterns Are Spatially Tuned and Environment Specific (A) Ensemble recordings and optogenetic manipulation of CamKII::ArchT mice. (B) Schematic of one recording block, with repeated exposure to either the familiar or novel enclosure (see Figures S1A–S1D). (C) Assembly patterns identified from repeated coincident neuronal discharges in 25 ms time bins spanning the exposure session (see Figure S2). For visualization purposes, the 60 simultaneously recorded principal neurons are ordered and color coded to highlight neurons with high weight to the same pattern. Shown are an ∼1.5 s example raster plot of the spike trains (top left; one neuron per row), along with the expression strength time course of each detected pattern (bottom left), their weight vectors (top right), and corresponding assembly spatial maps (bottom right; numbers indicate peak assembly pattern activation rate). At the bottom, single-neuron firing rate maps (numbers indicate peak firing rate) are shown for the five neurons with high weight (highlighted in red) in the first pattern. (D and E) Detected assembly patterns group together neurons with correlated firing activity and overlapping spatial tuning. Both the average co-firing coefficient (D) and place-field similarity (E) are much higher for pairs of neurons with a high weight to the same pattern (n = 919 member pairs) than for other neuron pairs (n = 59,823 other pairs). Error bars represent ± 1 SEM; ∗∗∗p < 0.001. (F) Detected assembly patterns are environment specific. Example from one recording day showing that patterns expressed during an exposure session are more similar to those identified during re-exposure to that enclosure (left) than to those identified in another enclosure of a different recording block (right).

Figure 2

Figure 2

Assembly Pattern Reactivation Following a Novel, but Not Familiar, Enclosure Correlates with Upcoming Awake Reinstatement (A) Scatterplot of the reinstatement strength (change in expression strength from exposure to re-exposure) versus the reactivation strength (change in expression strength from rest before to rest after; see also Figures S1F–S1H) of assembly patterns detected in the familiar (black) or novel (red) enclosure. Dashed lines are corresponding ordinary least-squares regression lines (familiar, slope = 0.02, p = 0.81, R2 = 0.00; novel, slope = 0.27, p < 0.001, R2 = 0.08). (B) Correlation between reactivation and reinstatement strength is stronger after a novel enclosure than after the familiar one. Error bars represent ± 1 SE of the correlation coefficient; novel versus zero, ∗∗∗p < 0.001; familiar versus novel, #p < 0.05.

Figure 3

Figure 3

Optogenetic SWR Silencing Impairs Reinstatement of Assembly Patterns Associated with a Novel, but Not Familiar, Enclosure (A and B) Closed-loop feedback transiently silencing principal neurons during SWRs is illustrated with a raw data example (A) and quantified by the firing rate response (mean ± SEM) of principal neurons (B; light-OFF, n = 1,988 neurons; light-ON, n = 1,527). (C) After exposure to a novel enclosure, SWR silencing impairs the reinstatement of assembly patterns during context re-exposure (light-OFF, n = 139 patterns; light-ON, n = 136). This is not the case following exposure to the familiar enclosure (light-OFF, n = 108 patterns; light-ON, n = 78). As reinstatement strength is defined by the change in a pattern’s average expression strength from exposure to re-exposure, a null score corresponds to “perfect” reinstatement while the more negative, the worse the reinstatement. Data are represented as mean ± SEM; ∗∗∗p < 0.001. See also Figure S3.

Figure 4

Figure 4

Offline Reactivation Is Required for Reinstatement of Gradually Strengthened, but Not of Early Stabilized, Assembly Patterns (A) The expression strength (mean ± SEM) of gradually strengthened patterns (purple; n = 134) continually increases during the exposure session, while that of early stabilized patterns (orange; n = 201) is more stable. Yet both sets are equally strengthened in the first few minutes. (B) Examples of two early stabilized (top) assembly patterns simultaneously expressed with two gradually strengthened (bottom) assembly patterns. (C) In the light-OFF condition, the reactivation of gradually strengthened patterns, but not of early stabilized ones, correlates with their reinstatement strength during context re-exposure. Dashed lines are corresponding ordinary least-squares regression lines (early stabilized, slope = 0.03, p = 0.78, R2 = 0.00; gradually strengthened, slope = 0.45, p < 0.001, R2 = 0.21). Error bars represent ± 1 SE of the correlation coefficient; gradually strengthened versus zero, ∗∗∗p < 0.001; early stabilized versus gradually strengthened, ##p < 0.01. (D) SWR silencing does not impair the context-dependent reinstatement of early stabilized patterns (light-OFF, n = 82 patterns; light-ON, n = 83; other enclosure, n = 155), but causes the reinstatement of gradually strengthened patterns to drop to the unspecific level at which they are expressed in a distinct enclosure of another recording block that day (light-OFF, n = 57 patterns; light-ON, n = 53; other enclosure, n = 103). Data are represented as mean ± SEM; ∗∗p < 0.01, ∗∗∗p < 0.001. See also Table S1.

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