Topic: emotional memories

The interaction of the hippocampus and amygdala, crucial for the formation of emotional memories, may play a central role in the pathophysiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). However, with amygdala hyperactivity regarded as a hallmark of PTSD, it is still not clear whether amygdala hyperresponsiveness before a traumatic event is a predisposing factor for the development of PTSD or is an acquired condition upon trauma. To address this question, in the current study, we explore the effect of heightened amygdala activity on anxiety and fear memory in the formation of hippocampal fear m

We often perceive memories as unified experiences although they comprise a multiplicity of different modalities and features. How the different aspects of a memory are encoded separately or jointly in the brain’s memory systems is not well understood. A key brain structure that has been identified to be involved in processing emotional memories is the ventral hippocampus. In our study we use virtual environments to induce in head-fixed mice the recall of distinct memories of a trace fear conditioning, consisting of a cue-triggered temporal and a context-triggered emotional component. To invest

Creating internal representations of the surrounding context and stabilizing them are essential for safe exploration of the environment. Spatial memories in the dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) are initially encoded by place-cells during awake exploration and stabilized during non-REM sleep fast oscillations (sharp-wave ripples) through place cell reactivation. The hippocampal formation is heterogeneous; the dHPC processes mostly contextual information, while the ventral part (vHPC) encodes valence and anxiety. This functional segregation is supported by the stronger connectivity of the vHPC with oth