Topic: trace fear conditioning

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

The formation of new memories requires the hippocampus, a brain region which exhibits high levels of structural plasticity. Within the dorsal hippocampal CA1, specific interneuron subtypes synapse onto specific subcellular compartments of Pyramidal Neurons (PNs) such as dendrites, soma and axon initial segment (AIS) thus shaping the cellular computations underlying memory formation. Yet, very little is known about the long-term structural dynamics of these compartmentalized inhibitory synapses on PNs and their link to learning.To address these outstanding questions, we used longitudinal in viv