Temporal and Spatial Coordination of the Hippocampus, Retrosplenial Cortex, and Anterior Thalamus

Abstract

The ability to learn about an environment is fundamental to the survival of an organism. The hippocampus is a highly studied component of what is now known to be a distributed, brain-wide network; the coordinated activity of which supports this cognitive function. This thesis first examines the functional contributions made by a less studied node in this network, the retrosplenial cortex, which receives direct sensory and hippocampal input. More broadly, the integration of distributed information processing throughout the brain is necessary. It has been suggested that this can be achieved via the temporal coordination, or coherence, between populations of neurons. The next section of this thesis examines oscillatory co-activity across time in the hippocampus, retrosplenial cortex, and anterior thalamus during a task previously illustrated to involve these regions (Smith 2011). Distinct oscillatory features and single cell action potentials are found to uniquely correlate to brain and behavioral states.