Neural Dynamics of Memory Formation in the Primate Hippocampus

Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Milner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial representations are present in the primate brain and how to reconcile these representations with the known mnemonic function of this region. I will discuss a series of experiments that have examined neural activity in the hippocampus in monkeys performing behavioral tasks including foraging and spatial memory tasks in a virtual environment. Data from these experiments demonstrate that behavioral task structure has a significant influence on hippocampal activity, potentially providing a neural instantiation of a cognitive map that extends to non-spatial domains and serves as an important scaffold for memory formation.