A critical appraisal of the what-where-when episodic-like memory test in rodents: Achievements, caveats and future directions
Section snippets
General introduction and outline
Humans are capable of memorizing significant and personally important life events that were accompanied by increased emotional arousal (e.g. graduation days, car accidents). Moreover, memories of such emotional episodes can be recollected for a long period of time extending up to decades. On the other hand, we also encode, consolidate and retrieve less emotionally arousing events that happened within a period of a few days, and we are able to keep track of the sequence of events over the course
Neuroanatomy of ELM
Based on studies with patients suffering from hippocampal damage, it has been argued that episodic memory depends on intact hippocampal function (Tulving and Markowitsch, 1998). While there is strong evidence that some initially hippocampus-dependent memories can become independent from hippocampus with the passage of time during the course of consolidation (‘remote memory’; for review see Frankland and Bontempi, 2005), some theories, e.g., multiple trace theory, assume that especially episodic
A working hypothesis of the cognitive processes and dynamics involved in episodic-like memory formation
In order to have an idea of the various cognitive processes and dynamics that are involved in ELM formation in the WWWhen/ELM task developed by Dere et al., (2005b), and later on slightly modified by Kart-Teke et al. (2006) and Zlomuzica et al. (2007) we have now to think about the following central question: How is the animal possibly perceiving and processing the information presented during the sample and test trials? This information is crucial for the development of experimentally testable
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Grant No. DFG-DE1149/6-1 to ED.
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