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Summary of Hippocampal Studies since 1957:
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Required for certain kinds of memory; spatial in
rodents; facts and
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faces in humans.
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Rodent hippocampal neurons are “place cells”; ‘fire’
when animal
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moves into marked area.
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Hippocampal synapses exhibit LTP (paradigm for synaptic
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plasticity).
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Tsien et al: use cre/loxP recombination
system to delete NMDA
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receptor function only in CA1 subregion.
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THUS: By effecting CA1-specific NMDA receptor
inactivation, the
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studies relate synaptic plasticity to neuronal
activity (place fields)
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and to spatial learning.
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