Inah Lee, PhD
Professor of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
College of Natural Sciences
Seoul National University

The Hippocampus Remembers Eventful “Everything”
Our life is organized across space and time because we regularly interact with people and objects at various locations across different times. The details from those events are remembered as episodic memories, and our current understanding is that the hippocampus is essential for episodic memory. Although recent findings of important functional cell types such as ‘grid cells’ and ‘time cells’ in the hippocampus and its associated cortical regions have advanced our understanding of the neural mechanisms of hippocampal functions, it is still largely unknown how these different classes of neurons harmoniously work together to represent various details of experience, and more importantly to use the information for decision making. Among various types of information the hippocampal system cares for episodic behavior, our laboratory investigates how visual scene and object information is processed by the hippocampus and its cortical input regions including the perirhinal, postrhinal(parahippocampal), and entorhinal cortices. So far, we have learned that the hippocampus is essential in remembering visual contextual behavior using background scenes, but the upstream cortical regions seem to be conditionally involved depending on task demands. We have also found some differences among the different regions of the hippocampal system concerning their involvement in object recognition. In this talk, I will provide an overview of our research on this topic with our future directions to test visual scene memory more rigorously in a VR environment in both rodents and nonhuman primates.

This free lecture is made possible by a generous endowment from Professor Roger B. Loucks.