Lecture 12, 13, & 14 (+crelox) Flashcards
What did Hebb postulate to be the neurobiology of memory?
Modified ensembles of neurons called cell assemblies could provide a substrate for memories
How can neurobiologists study memory?
- Damage a particular region of the brain
- inject drugs into the brain that are designed to influence some aspect of neural function
- modify the DNA to increase or decrease the expression of some molecule
What is the Morris Water-escape task?
Mouse dropped in the water and must find a hidden platform
What are the two different temporal profiles of memory?
Short and long term
What are the two states memory can exist in?
Active and inactive
What are the two things you need to consider when trying to tell if a memory occurred or not?
Was it due to storage issue or a retrieval issue
What are popular memory tests?
- inhibitory avoidance
- fear conditioning
- spatial learning
- recognition tasks
What is inhibitory avoidance conditioning?
Zapping a mouse for doing something it wants to do (ex. Going into the dark or stepping down from a ledge) and seeing the latency of them doing it again shoot up
What are some important attributes of Inhibitory Avoidance Training?
- only one trial is needed to produce a memory for this experience
- behavior is correlated with the intensity of the shock
- many modifications of this task
What is fear conditioning?
Giving the mouse a cue (usually auditory or context) and then shocking them, and then playing the cue again and seeing how long the mouse freezes for (time thinking)
What would be a spatial learning test?
Morris Water Test
What are the measurements and important aspects of the Morris Water test?
- Measurement: escape latency, path length, probe trial, and search time
- visible platform test is done to ensure that the normal results are purely due to lack of memory
What are recognition memory tasks?
- novel-object recognition
- object-place location
- object in context
Testing if the new items influence activity level
What are some experimental approaches to the study of memory?
- stereotaxic surgery
- DREADDS
- genetic engineering
- optogenetics
What is memory defined as?
An experience dependent alteration in behavior that persists beyond the original stimulus
What are the stages of memory?
Encoding, consolidation, retrieval, and forgetting
What are engram neurons?
Neurons that mediate a particular membrane across stages
What behavioral tests did the Morris et al. Study use?
Administration of AP5 (NMDA antagonist) through a cannula and the Morris Water Maze
What did the behavioral measures in Morris et al. Look into?
- latency to escape across the 10 days of behavioral training
- whether over training would allow rats to overcome NMDA blockade
- assessed whether a probe trails would show differences between rats with NMDA receptor blockade vs control
What did the Morris et al. Paper suggest?
NMDA is critical to LTP induction and participate in the initiation of a memory
How many subunits are NMDA composed of?
4
What are the 2 classes of the NMDA subunits?
GluN1 and GluN2 (this one has hella subtypes like A, B, C, D, etc)
What is the point of a Cre-loxP system?
To knock out or express a gene in specific cell types without affecting other cells in the body
How do you breed the crelox mouse?
Round 1: Breed a cre mouse with a homozygous loxP flexed mouse -> cre and one chromosome floxed mouse
Round 2: breed the one chromosome floxed mouse with another homozygous floxed mouse -> homozygous floxed cre mouse
What are the three possible things you can do with crelox?
Inversion deletion translocation
