Professor Ole Kiehn from Karolinska Institute, Stockholm, Sweden, will hold a seminar on Friday, 6th of November at 14:30.

Title: Physiological and molecular deciphering of mammalian locomotor networks.

Place: CBM, meeting room 3rd floor.

Date: 27 August 2009

Venue: auditorium at Øya Helsehus

Time: 10.15 – 15.15

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10.15 – 11.00

Public lecture by Hanne Lehn as part of the defense of her thesis entitled “Memory functions of the human medial temporal lobe studied with fMRI”

11.15 - 12.15

fMRI studies of sequence encoding and retrieval

Professor Dr. Chantal E. Stern, Boston Univ, Ctr Memory & Brain, Boston, USA

12.15 – 13.30 Lunch (by invitation only).

13.30 – 14.30

Pattern Separation in the Aging Hippocampus.

Professor Dr. Craig E. L. Stark, Univ CA, Irvine, USA

14.30 – 15.30

Mechanisms for episodic memory in the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus.

Professor Dr. Michael E. Hasselmo, Boston Univ, Ctr Memory & Brain, Boston, USA

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Date: 28 August 2009

Venue: auditorium at Øya Helsehus

Time: 10.15 – 12.15

Thesis defense Hanne Lehn

Seminar with Bruce McNaughton, Univ Lethbridge, Canada

Title: Phase precession in the toroidal attractor model for grid cells and path integration

Time: Wed 1 July, 14:00

Place: Kavli/CBM meeting room

Rafal Czajkowski is giving a seminar on

Insights into spatial memory formation in retrosplenial cortex

Time: Tuesday 2 June at 13.00

Place: MTFS, CBM, Meeting Room 3. floor

Abstract:

Retrosplenial cortex has been associated with spatial navigation as a part of the circuit responsible for head direction ad place recognition (the Papez circle). We therefore designed and successfully applied a behavioral paradigm that distinguished between an easy spatial task and a difficult one that involved integration of multiple external cues, in order to test RSC involvement in the spatial navigation. This task was applied to an imaging study that allowed monitoring RSC activation during selected stages of the experiment.

The FosGFP reporter had not been tested in a chronic in vivo study before. Therefore a thorough research was necessary to validate its usefulness as an effective marker of neuronal activation in vivo. We showed that FosGFP transgene activation in retrosplenial cortex can be reliably and repeatedly detected in vivo. Using FosGFP transgenic mouse we then showed that learning of water maze task in mice is accompanied by increase in c-Fos expression in RSC. The degree of increase is associated with task complexity and dependence on spatial cues. Moreover, we show that substantial fraction of cells in RSC shows high specificity for the “spatial” task variant. This effect was specific to RSC, since control areas did not display similar trend.

Taken together these results confirm the importance of retrosplenial cortex in complex navigation tasks. They also prompt further studies with FosGFP reporter that will shed light on other parts of the brain involved in spatial learning.

John Lisman, Volen Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University will give a seminar on

How grid-cell input leads to place fields: the role of gamma frequency inhibition

Date: 9 Feb 2009

Time: 2.00 pm

Place: Meeting room, Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, MTFS, NTNU