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The Processing of Social Information by Neurons in the Rat's Hippocampus.
Hanzlík, Adam-František ; Kelemen, Eduard (advisor) ; Ježek, Karel (referee)
ABTRACT In order to survive, an animal must be able to integrate vital information about it's surroundings, such as information about the environment and the social interactions therein. Decades of research have established the hippocampal formation as a structure indispensable for spatial memory. It was only recently, though, that evidence has emerged suggesting that the hippocampus, most notably the dorsal CA2 region, also supports the encoding of social information. New behavioural as well as electrophysiological evidence appeared, highlighting the importance of sleep for the processing of social information. In my thesis, I used microelectrodes to record the electrophysiological activity of individual CA2 neurons from freely-moving rats, during wake as well as in sleep. In order to study the processing of social information by hippocampal neurons, I employed a novel experimental paradigm in which social stimulation, in the form of two rat conspecifics, was presented in a spatial context. I report that the discharge of some CA2 neurons was organised within the experimental maze, even after social stimulation was added. Moreover, I observed that the spatial activity of neurons changed after the addition of social stimuli, and that it further changed when the location of the two conspecifics was shuffled....
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Memory consolidation of mental schemas during sleep
Hanzlík, Adam-František ; Kelemen, Eduard (advisor) ; Janíková, Martina (referee)
A core feature of the human mind is the ability of abstraction. Relying on this ability, a mental or cognitive schema is a memory framework which underlies alike memory representations. In order for newly acquired memory representations to be preserved for long-term storage, they have to undergo memory consolidation and sleep is a major factor in this process. In a rat model, learning in the context of an existing schema is faster and it is characterised by IEG up-regulation. It is presumable that consolidation during sleep enables the extraction of commonalities from alike memory representations, resulting in schema formation. On a mechanistic level, schemata might be formed by a process which (a) employs synaptic potentiation induced by neuronal replay, (b) requires synaptic downscaling and (c) affects overlapping memory representations. This overlapping character of schema creation might be reflected by the nature of neuronal replay in the hippocampus. It appears that individual sleep stages influence schemata consolidation differently. In human experiments on schemata consolidation, the amount of knowledge a participant is given prior to training is critical.
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