Topic: offline replay

The hippocampus maintains an online representation of an animal’s situation in the environment which supports navigation, and generates offline simulations of plausible trajectories in that environment which are used for recall, imagination, planning, and the consolidation of memories. A leading theory is that these capacities rely on an attractive neuronal manifold, or cognitive map, in CA3, with topological correspondence to space. Supporting this idea, continuous attractor neural networks (CANNs) show place cell-like tuning for spatial locations, and can be used to simulate plausible trajec

New tasks are often similar in structure to old ones. Animals that take advantage of such conserved or “abstract” task structures can master new tasks with minimal training. To understand the neural basis of this abstraction, we developed a novel behavioural paradigm for mice and recorded from their medial frontal neurons as they learned. Freely moving mice learned multiple tasks where they had to visit 4 rewarded locations in sequence (ABCD) on a 3x3 spatial maze. Tasks shared the same circular transition structure (… ABCDABCD …) but differed in the locations and geometric arrangement of rewa