Aging and Neural Ensembles in the Perirhinal Cortex

在过去的几十年里，海马一直是年龄相关记忆的实验焦点 下降虽然这是合理的，但在嗅周皮层，一个广泛存在于大脑中的区域， 与海马体相互连接的神经元，导致与年龄相关的行为缺陷是未知的。人类与 海马体的损伤丧失了形成新记忆的能力， 大脑皮层发展为语义性痴呆，其特征是大脑皮层中的神经元在大脑皮层中的活动逐渐减弱， 语义知识因此，虽然海马体是形成新记忆的关键， 可以整体地参与向那些存储器提供内容。的响应属性是否 在正常衰老过程中，鼻周神经元改变，和/或鼻周可塑性下降， 导致记忆力受损，是本提案中要解决的主要问题。开始 为了解决这个问题，我们将在成年人和成年人中研究嗅周功能和识别记忆的机制， 老年大鼠的电生理记录和细胞间室神经系统成像 通过荧光原位杂交分析时间活动。

During the past several decades, the hippocampus has been an empirical focus of age-related memory decline. While this isjustified, the extent to which changes in the perirhinal cortex, a region extensively interconnected with the hippocampus, contribute to age-related behavioral deficits is unknown. Humans with lesions of the hippocampus lose the ability to form new memories while humans with lesions of the perirhinal cortex develop semantic dementia, a condition characterized by an insidious and gradual breakdown in semantic knowledge. Thus, while the hippocampus is criticalfor forming new memories, the perirhinal cortex may be integrally involved in providing content to those memories. Whether the response properties of perirhinal neurons change, and/or there is a decline in perirhinal plasticity during normal aging that contributes to memory impairment, is the major question addressed in the present proposal. To begin to address this, perirhinal function and the mechanisms of recognition memory will be investigated in adult and aged rats using electrophysiological recordings and imaging neural ensembles with cellular compartmental analysis of temporal activity by fluorescence in situ hybridization.