Description
- Abstract:
- The medial temporal lobe (MTL) plays important roles in humans and animal cognition, for example, in episodic memory and spatial navigation. In rodents, two prominent areas within the MTL are the perirhinal cortex (PER), and the postrhinal cortex (POR, homologous to the primate parahippocampal cortex); they support hippocampal functioning via direct and indirect projections. However, it is an open question whether the PER and POR also interact with areas outside the MTL for cognitive functions like learning and memory. One candidate is the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC), which has been proposed to construct and modify detailed associative models of the environment and events for reward learning. In Chapter 1, I reviewed the existing literature on the contributions of the PER and POR to context-modulated behavior and proposed that the OFC utilizes contextual associations in the PER and POR for expressing behaviors in the proper context. In Chapter 2, I described my experiment showing that both the PER and POR are important for a sensory preconditioning procedure that requires utilizing latently acquired associations for model-based inference. When either the PER or POR was chemogenetically suppressed, adult rats displayed an impairment when responding to the preconditioning stimulus. In Chapter 3, I created combined unilateral inactivations using the same technique and showed that both OFC-PER and OFC-POR connectivity are necessary for successful sensory preconditioning, likely because the PER and POR provide latently acquired information to the OFC for model-based inference. In Chapter 4 I discussed the implications of my findings and outlined possible future directions. Overall, my research demonstrated the functional significance of the interaction between the prefrontal cortex and the parahippocampal region of the MTL (including the PER and POR) in the integration of latent learning and goal-directed behavior, complementing existing knowledge on how the MTL and other brain systems cooperate for flexible and adaptive behavior.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Peng, Xiangyuan,
"Parahippocampal-Orbitofrontal Interaction at the Interface Between Latent Learning and Goal-Directed Behavior"
(2023).
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:22ummn9u/
Relations
Collection:
-
Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences department....