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June 18 (UPI) – The hippocampus, one of the largest regions of the brain, is best known as the epicenter of long-term memory, but it handles other tasks as well.
In a new study, researchers have highlighted the importance of the hippocampus for short-term and spatial memory, as well as for real-time decision making.
Latest findings – published Friday in the journal Science Advances – suggests that the much studied brain region is essential to our navigation skills.
Experiments showed that as study volunteers scan their surroundings, taking navigational cues, the hippocampus comes alive with neural activity – setting up and sorting out short-term memories and them. visual information that the brain uses to make decisions on the fly.
“At any point in time, your brain is rapidly triggering eye movements that you are usually not aware of,” corresponding study author James Kragel said in a press release.
“Our results suggest that the hippocampus uses memory to indicate where your eyes are looking, thus preparing the visual system to learn and re-evaluate our environment on the fly,” said Kragel, postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine.
More than just making decisions about whether to turn left or right, the hippocampus helps the brain forge connections between distinct but related visual stimuli.
Suppose a person is walking down the street and sees a car parked askew in the middle of a neighbor’s front yard. It’s strange, but it’s a busy morning, and the image is quickly put aside.
Moments later, a fire engine and an ambulance whirl past. Without the hippocampus, the brain might not associate these two short-term memories.
With a functioning hippocampus, however, a person can connect the dots and reconsider the car seen moments earlier.
With the help of the hippocampus, these two short-term memories become long-term memories.
“If you haven’t looked back and seen the crash you might not be able to encode this important information, but by using short-term garbage collection you can tie these clues together and remember details that are reminiscent of bigger memories, ”Kragel said. “It all comes down to making connections between these disparate pieces that make it much easier for you to remember them later.”
While the hippocampus may still take nostalgic dreamers on a trip down memory lane, new research suggests that the fabrication and processing of memory plays an important role in our ability to process our visual experiences from moment to moment.
“This [understanding] is the key to understanding hippocampal function and developing effective treatments for memory impairment, ”said study author Joel Voss, associate professor of medical social sciences, neurology, psychiatry and behavioral sciences in Feinberg.
“It’s like using your memory to plan out what to expect, then when that doesn’t match up with what’s really going on, your hippocampus is activated to reassess and update your current perception of what’s going on,” Kragel said.
For the study, the researchers recruited patients with epilepsy who had gone to Northwestern Memorial Hospital to ask to locate the neurological origins of their seizures.
While the volunteers were in the epilepsy monitoring unit and connected to electrodes, the researchers had them perform a memory task.
Each study participant was forced to digitize a series of intricate scenes, each featuring a variety of people and objects, such as a person sitting at a picnic table having lunch while visitors to the park and pets frolic in the background. Subsequently, the volunteers were subjected to a memory quiz.
During the quiz, volunteers were asked whether the scenes they were watching were old or new. In addition to recording brain activity, the researchers monitored the eye movements of study participants.
Scientists found that by studying a scene for the first time, participants regularly re-gazed at a place they had looked at milliseconds earlier.
The electrode showed patterns of neuronal activity in the hippocampus shifted just before these “revisiting” eye movements. In addition, each revisit was followed by an increase in brain activity.
“This shows that the contribution of the hippocampus to memory takes place over a few hundred milliseconds during an ongoing behavior, which is surprising given that the evolution over time of its involvement, generally observed in the long-term memory recovery, is generally considered from a few days to several years, ”mentioned.
The latest information on the functionality of the hippocampus could ultimately inspire new treatments for age-related memory decline and neurodegenerative diseases like dementia, the researchers say.
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