Julia Brzac

Presentation Title

Recruitment of Retrosplenial Cortex in Spatial Mnemonic Processing  

Abstract

The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is heavily interconnected with sensorimotor cortices and subcortical regions, including the hippocampal formation (HPC) and anterior thalamic nuclei (ATN). In addition to a role in spatial navigation, this limbic circuit is highly implicated in mnemonic processing. RSC’s role in integrating stimuli, both sensory and navigational, has continued to be a topic of investigation, where simple associations seemingly do not engage the region, but more complex tasks do. Here, we first validate our adapted cheeseboard task, a standard spatial paradigm targeting the integration of reward locations and allocentric referencing. Rats robustly maintained stereotyped paths after a break from exposure to the task. Second, we establish a contextual cheeseboard paradigm using visual cues, a more ethologically appropriate task to test for RSC recruitment for context, task-phases, and spatial information simultaneously. Here, we confirm the success of our Alternated Contexts task (AC), with rats successfully discriminating reward wells based on a visual environmental cue.