Karolinska Institutet Psychology Speaker Series

The hippocampus of the mammalian cortex is involved in episodic memory and spatial navigation. This brain structure is linked to the rest of the cortex through the entorhinal cortex. In this lecture, I will explore functional properties of neurons and neural networks in the entorhinal cortex. I will show that entorhinal cortex contains a number of specialized neurons involved in mapping of self-motion, self-location and object location, and that neurons in this brain area participate in representation of the animal´s trajectory during navigation as well as memory processes, such as formation of odour-space associations. The findings suggest that entorhinal cortex provides the hippocampus with a framework for identifying where you are and where things are and what happens where in your environment, which are necessary elements for the formation of  episodic memories.