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Adult‐born neurons are necessary for extended contextual discrimination
Author(s) -
Tronel Sophie,
Belnoue Laure,
Grosjean Noelle,
Revest JeanMichel,
Piazza PierVincenzo,
Koehl Muriel,
Abrous Djoher Nora
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
hippocampus
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.767
H-Index - 155
eISSN - 1098-1063
pISSN - 1050-9631
DOI - 10.1002/hipo.20895
Subject(s) - dentate gyrus , neurogenesis , neuroscience , hippocampus , psychology , representation (politics) , process (computing) , computer science , politics , political science , law , operating system
New neurons are continuously produced in the adult dentate gyrus of the hippocampus. It has been shown that one of the functions of adult neurogenesis is to support spatial pattern separation, a process that transforms similar memories into nonoverlapping representations. This prompted us to investigate whether adult‐born neurons are required for discriminating two contexts, i.e., for identifying a familiar environment and detect any changes introduced in it. We show that depleting adult‐born neurons impairs the animal's ability to disambiguate two contexts after extensive training. These data suggest that the continuous production of new dentate neurons plays a crucial role in extracting and separating efficiently contextual representation in order to discriminate features within events. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.