Writing Response #10:   Hippocampus, Memory, and Sleep

The following papers are required reading for the week of November 30th:

Davidson, T. J., Kloosterman, F., Wilson, M. A. (2009) Hippocampal Replay of Extended Experience, Neuron, 63, 497-507.
Bendor, D., Wilson, M. (2012) Biasing the Content of Hippocampal Replay During Sleep, Nature Neuroscience 15: 1439-1444.

In advance of Wednesday's presentation and discussion of this reading, you should submit a response to the following questions:

In the Davidson et al. (2009) paper, the authors note that previous studies had shown that short "replay" events occur in the rat hippocampus, corresponding to recent spatial experience in small environments, but in the wild, rats may navigate over an area as large as hundreds of meters. This led the authors to pose the following questions: "Can the hippocampus support replay across larger spatial scales? If so, is such extended replay further compressed in time or is there a fixed rate at which replay progresses? If the latter, how are longer sequences mapped onto short-lasting ripple events?" Describe how these basic questions were answered in this paper. Do the empirical results presented in Davidson et al. (2009) clearly establish that replay of neural sequences associated with previous experience plays a causal role in memory consolidation? Why or why not?

You should write at most one page (500 words) in response to these questions. In addition, you should also submit a question of your own, related to the reading. This writing assignment is due on Tuesday, December 1 at midnight and should be submitted to the 9.523 course site on stellar using your private account: https://stellar.mit.edu/S/course/9/fa15/9.523/. If you have a problem with submitting to stellar, please send your response to Ellen Hildreth at ehildreth@wellesley.edu.