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Psychological and Brain Sciences Spence Lecture: Elizabeth Buffalo, University of Washington
Oct 18, 2024
03:30 PM
Psychological and Brain Sciences Building, B70
340 Iowa Avenue, Iowa City, IA 52240

Psychological and Brain Sciences Spence Lecture
Elizabeth Buffalo, Wayne E Crill Endowed Professor, Department of Neurobiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine
Towards a Unified View of the Primate Hippocampus
Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Milner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O'Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial representations are present in the primate brain and how to reconcile these representations with the known mnemonic function of this region. I will discuss a series of experiments that have examined neural activity in the hippocampus in monkeys performing behavioral tasks including foraging and spatial memory tasks in a virtual environment. Data from these experiments demonstrate that behavioral task structure has a significant influence on hippocampal activity, potentially providing a neural instantiation of a cognitive map that extends to non-spatial domains and serves as an important scaffold for memory formation.
The Spence Lecture Series is sponsored by the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences and the Iowa Neuroscience Institute in honor of the late Professor Kenneth W. Spence, chair of the department from 1942-1964.
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