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Perimeters are an important part of the environment, delimiting its geometry. Here, we investigated how perimeters (vertical walls; vertical drops) affect neuronal responses in the rostral thalamus (the anteromedial and parataenial nuclei in particular). We found neurons whose firing patterns reflected the presence of walls and drops, irrespective of arena shape. Their firing patterns were stable across multiple sleep-wake cycles and were independent of ambient lighting conditions. Thus, rostral thalamic nuclei may participate in spatial representation by encoding the perimeters of environments.

The past decade has seen a transformation in research on the retrosplenial cortex (RSC). This cortical area has emerged as a key member of a core network of brain regions that underpins a range of cognitive functions, including episodic memory, navigation, imagination and planning for the future. It is now also evident that the RSC is consistently compromised in the most common neurological disorders that impair memory. Here we review advances on multiple fronts, most notably in neuroanatomy, animal studies and neuroimaging, that have highlighted the importance of the RSC for cognition, and consider why specifying its precise functions remains problematic.

Fos levels were measured in rats trained in one of two qualitatively different spatial memory tasks in a water maze. In one task, ( landmark condition) rats found a submerged platform that was always 25 cm south of a visible landmark, the absolute position of the platform and landmark changing after every trial. In the other task ( place condition), rats swam to a platform that remained in the same absolute position on every session, but changed session to session, with this task relying on the memory of allocentric cues. Despite matched swim times, the landmark condition resulted in higher levels of Fos in a wide range of cortical and subcortical sites, including the hippocampus and its connections. Structural equation modelling revealed two different patterns of hippocampal function. In the allocentric place task there was a significant association between Fos activity in the entorhinal cortices and the hippocampus proper, while in the non-allocentric landmark task this relationship was not present, but was replaced by a connection from the entorhinal cortices to the subiculum. Thus, the two different tasks engage two different modes of hippocampal activity as demonstrated by Fos expression.

The hallmark of medial temporal lobe amnesia is a loss of episodic memory such that patients fail to remember new events that are set in an autobiographical context (an episode). A further symptom is a loss of recognition memory. The relationship between these two features has recently become contentious. Here, we focus on the central issue in this dispute — the relative contributions of the hippocampus and the perirhinal cortex to recognition memory. A resolution is vital not only for uncovering the neural substrates of these key aspects of memory, but also for understanding the processes disrupted in medial temporal lobe amnesia and the validity of animal models of this syndrome.

It has been proposed that the hippocampal formation is necessary for the acquisition of tasks that require the use of configural representations for their solution, including spatial learning and negative patterning. Tests of this influential view have, however, yielded conflicting results. For example fornix or hippocampal lesions, which reliably impair spatial learning, do not reliably impair negative patterning. A problem in interpreting these results has been the lack of controls for factors such as over-responding, excitatory effects of reward, and the possibility of non-configural solutions. At the same time, other studies have pointed to a role in configural learning for parahippocampal regions such as the perirhinal cortex. The present experiments controlled for the above factors and revealed that neither lesions of the fornix nor of the perirhinal/postrhinal cortex in the rat had any effect on negative patterning, although subsequent tests of object and spatial memory demonstrated the functional efficacy of the lesions.

Rats of four different strains (DA, Fischer 344, PVG hooded, and Sprague-Dawley) were trained on a nonspatial recognition task. The task, delayed-nonmatching-to-sample, required the rat to select between two complex stimuli on the basis of their relative familiarity. The four strains differed markedly. The two pigmented strains (DA and PVG) were significantly better than the two albino strains (Fischer 344 and Sprague-Dawley); among the pigmented strains, the DA rats consistently had the higher scores. The Fischer 344 rats had the lowest scores, and their pattern of errors indicated that they were performing in a qualitatively different manner from the other three strains. A control test with the two pigmented strains confirmed that they were able to use visual cues to solve the task. The results point to the likely value of the DA strain for such experiments and highlight potential confounding variables arising from the use of different strains for psychobiological research.

The interconnections between the amygdala and the hippocampal formation were investigated in the macaque monkey using anterograde tracers. The hippocampal inputs to the amygdala arose from the subicular and entorhinal cortices and passed through the angular bundle to terminate principally in the medial basal and lateral basal nuclei, with lighter termination in the lateral nucleus, the periamygdaloid cortex, and the cortical-transition area. The majority of these amygdaloid inputs arose from the rostral hippocampal formation although there was equivocal evidence of an additional projection from the caudal hippocampus to the central nucleus. Projections arose from many of the amygdaloid nuclei to terminate in the molecular layer of the amygdalo-hippocampal area and the adjacent stratum moleculare of the uncal portion of the hippocampus. The accessory basal, lateral basal, and medial basal nuclei also projected to the most rostral portions of the stratum moleculare of fields CA1-3, the heaviest termination occurring in field CA3. Additional projections from the basal nuclei terminated in the prosubiculum, presubiculum, and parasubiculum. The heaviest entorhinal inputs arose from the accessory basal and lateral nuclei and terminated in layers I, II, and III of areas 28b, 28i, and the prorhinal cortex. The major amygdaloid input to the perirhinal cortex arose from the lateral basal nucleus.

The intrinsic amygdaloid connections of the cynomolgus monkey were investigated using the autoradiographic method. Additional evidence concerning the origin of some intra-amygdaloid connections was provided by a series of rhesus monkeys with injections of horseradish peroxidase (HRP) in the amygdaloid complex. The experiments indicated that each of the major amygdaloid nuclei possesses a unique, organized set of intrinsic projections. Furthermore, there were large differences in the magnitude of the internal connections arising from or terminating in the various nuclei. The heaviest intrinsic projections arose from the lateral and basal nuclei while the central, medial, cortical, and accessory basal nuclei received the greatest number of these afferents. Thus, there was a clear trend for the bulk of these connections to run dorsally and medially within the amygdala. One important function of these intrinsic connections may be the integration of afferent sensory information from the various association areas which project to the amygdala.