Emotions have been shown to have profound and long-lasting effects on memory. In particular, negative emotional memories can remain salient even years after a traumatic episode occurs. In some cases, such as in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), traumatic memories are improperly retrieved and often interfere with daily life. The hippocampus, an area involved in memory formation, plays an important role in learned fear of a context. However, the specific ways in which emotional information is stored in hippocampal subregions are not well understood.This project will investigate the roles of the dorsal and ventral regions of the hippocampus in the encoding and consolidation of fear memories by combining in vivo recordings in freely moving mice with genetic, computational, and behavioral tools to evaluate how the firing properties of hippocampal neurons change over time as animals form and retrieve emotional memories. The expectation is that contextual representations in the dorsal and the ventral hippocampus will change as animals learn that a specific location is fearful. These experiments will be critical to our understanding of how episodic fear memories are encoded along the longitudinal hippocampal axis.
The broader impact of this project will be to expand interest in the field of neuroscience by enhancing local infrastructure for education through contributions to the Neuroscience in Your World program organized by the Franklin Institute and the University of Pennsylvania. Also, the tools developed for this program will be linked to the Resources for Science Learning at http://www.fi.edu, an educational website that welcomes 1 million visits per month.
