Achievement

Anoopum Gupta, an MD/PhD student developing computational models of the rodent hippocampus, received IGERT funding to learn neurophysiological recording in the lab of Professor David Redish of the University of Minnesota. Gupta conducted an experiment to study the phenomenon of "replay", where cells in the hippocampus tuned for specific places will play back representations of trajectory sequences the rat had previously experienced. His surprising results, which appeared in the March 11, 2010 edition of the journal Neuron, were that the hippocampus does not preferentially replay more recent sequences over more distant ones as a leading hypotheses about replay mechanisms had predicted. Furthermore, rats sometimes "replayed" sequences representing shortcuts through the maze that they had never actually experienced. This suggests that replay may serve to flesh out rats' cognitive maps and provide them with a more general representation suitable for planning new trajectories.