Hippocampal Codes in Spatial Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease

Singer, Annabelle

Title:

Hippocampal Codes in Spatial Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease

dc.contributor.author	Singer, Annabelle
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. Neural Engineering Center	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. Wallace H. Coulter Dept. of Biomedical Engineering	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2016-11-14T18:58:57Z
dc.date.available	2016-11-14T18:58:57Z
dc.date.issued	2016-10-31
dc.description	Presented on October 31, 2016 at 11:00 a.m. in the Engineered Biosystems Building (EBB), Room 1005	en_US
dc.description	Annabelle Singer is an Assistant Professor in the Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech. Her research takes a multi-dimensional approach to deciphering neural activity, observing and manipulating such activity during behavior to understand how the brain learns and remembers experiences. In the course of her research Dr. Singer has developed new methods to record neural activity during behavior, novel approaches to analyze complex neural data, and new approaches to treat cognitive disease.	en_US
dc.description	Runtime: 48:31 minutes	en_US
dc.description.abstract	The hippocampus is essential for both spatial navigation and episodic memory. While decades of research has revealed patterns of neural activity in the hippocampus that represent information about the spatial environment, called spatial coding, how these patterns relate to memory processes is still unclear. Our lab uses a combination of behavior, neural recording, optogenetic manipulation, and computational tools to understand the neural underpinning of learning and memory in health and disease. In this talk I will address how hippocampal neural codes guide memory-based decisions and how they go awry in disease’s that effect memory. First, by recording the activity of many single neurons simultaneously as an animal learns a spatial navigation task, we examined how spatial codes inform future decisions. We found that when an animal has to choose a path through space, the hippocampus reactivates neural activity that represents the possible paths to choose from, essentially foreseeing where to go based on past experience. We then examined how this activity fails in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), since spatial navigation deficits are one of the earliest symptoms of AD and the hippocampus is one of the areas first affected by the disease. Using a virtual reality behavior paradigm to record and manipulate neural activity in transgenic mice, the primary animal model of AD, we found deficits in hippocampal neural activity early in the progression of the disease. These deficits occurred in the same patterns of activity that we have found inform memory-guided decisions in a spatial navigation task. Finally, I will discuss optogenetically driving these patterns of activity in the AD mouse model.	en_US
dc.format.extent	48:31 minutes
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/56018
dc.relation.ispartofseries	GT Neuro Seminar Series
dc.subject	Alzheimers	en_US
dc.subject	Hippocampus	en_US
dc.subject	Spatial learning and memory	en_US
dc.title	Hippocampal Codes in Spatial Memory and Alzheimer’s Disease	en_US
dc.type	Moving Image
dc.type.genre	Lecture
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.corporatename	Neural Engineering Center
local.relation.ispartofseries	GT Neuro Seminar Series
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication	c2e26044-257b-4ef6-8634-100dd836a06c
relation.isSeriesOfPublication	608bde12-7f29-495f-be22-ac0b124e68c5