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The Journal of Neuroscience, December 5, 2007, 27(49):13567-13578; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3589-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
The Medial Prefrontal Cortex Is Involved in Spatial Memory Retrieval under Partial-Cue Conditions

Yong Sang Jo,¹ Eun Hye Park,¹ Il Hwan Kim,² Soon Kwon Park,³ Hyun Kim,² Hyun Taek Kim,¹ and June-Seek Choi¹

¹Department of Psychology, Korea University, Seoul 136-701, Korea, ²Department of Anatomy, Korea University College of Medicine, Seoul, Korea, and ³School of Alternative Medicine and Health Science, Jeonju University, Jeonju 520-759, Korea

Correspondence should be addressed to June-Seek Choi, Department of Psychology, Korea University, Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 136-701, Korea. Email: j-schoi{at}korea.ac.kr

Brain circuits involved in pattern completion, or retrieval of memory from fragmented cues, were investigated. Using different versions of the Morris water maze, we explored the roles of the CA3 subregion of the hippocampus and the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) in spatial memory retrieval under various conditions. In a hidden platform task, both CA3 and mPFC lesions disrupted memory retrieval under partial-cue, but not under full-cue, conditions. For a delayed matching-to-place task, CA3 lesions produced a deficit in both forming and recalling spatial working memory regardless of extramaze cue conditions. In contrast, damage to mPFC impaired memory retrieval only when a fraction of cues was available. To corroborate the lesion study, we examined the expression of the immediate early gene c-fos in mPFC and the hippocampus. After training of spatial reference memory in full-cue conditions for 6 d, the same training procedure in the absence of all cues except one increased the number of Fos-immunoreactive cells in mPFC and CA3. Furthermore, mPFC inactivation with muscimol, a GABA agonist, blocked memory retrieval in the degraded-cue environment. However, mPFC-lesioned animals initially trained in a single-cue environment had no difficulty in retrieving spatial memory when the number of cues was increased, demonstrating that contextual change per se did not impair the behavioral performance of the mPFC-lesioned animals. Together, these findings strongly suggest that pattern completion requires interactions between mPFC and the hippocampus, in which mPFC plays significant roles in retrieving spatial information maintained in the hippocampus for efficient navigation.

Key words: prefrontal cortex; CA3; spatial memory; pattern completion; memory retrieval; water maze; c-fos

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Received Aug. 7, 2007; revised Oct. 11, 2007; accepted Oct. 26, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to June-Seek Choi, Department of Psychology, Korea University, Anam-dong, Seongbuk-gu, Seoul 136-701, Korea. Email: j-schoi{at}korea.ac.kr

This article has been cited by other articles:

				I. Lee and F. Solivan The roles of the medial prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in a spatial paired-association task Learn. Mem., May 5, 2008; 15(5): 357 - 367. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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