Acetylcholine and Spontaneous Recognition Memory in Rodents and Primates
Whilst acetylcholine has long been linked to memory, there have been significant questions about its specific role. In particular, the effects of cholinergic manipulations in primates and rodents has often been at odds. Here, we review the work in primate
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Contents 1 A Content-Based Approach to Episodic Memory 2 The Role of Acetylcholine in What-Where-Which Occasion Memory 3 Differential Roles of Acetylcholine in the Hippocampus and Perirhinal Cortex 4 Does the What-Where-Which Task Measure Episodic Memory? 5 The Role of Acetylcholine in Encoding and Retrieval References
Abstract Whilst acetylcholine has long been linked to memory, there have been significant questions about its specific role. In particular, the effects of cholinergic manipulations in primates and rodents has often been at odds. Here, we review the work in primates and rodents on the specific function of acetylcholine in memory, and episodic memory in particular. We propose that patterns of impairment can best be understood in terms of a role for hippocampal acetylcholine in resolving spatial interference and we discuss the benefits of new tasks of episodic memory in animals allowing clearer translation of findings to the clinic. Keywords Acetylcholine · Episodic memory · Interference
Acetylcholine has long been linked to a role in memory (Drachman 1977; Hasselmo 2006; Micheau and Marighetto 2011), with loss of the transmitter evident in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease associated specifically with memory loss (Bierer et al. 1995). In particular, the projections of cholinergic cells from the basal forebrain to
A. Easton (*) and C. Lever Department of Psychology, Durham University, Durham, UK Learning and Memory Processes Centre, Durham University, Durham, UK e-mail: [email protected] M. Barros Department of Pharmacy, University of Brasilia, Brasilia, Brazil © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Curr Topics Behav Neurosci https://doi.org/10.1007/7854_2020_132
A. Easton et al.
the cerebral cortex and hippocampus rising within the medial septum (MS) and vertical limb of the diagonal band (vDB) have been linked to memory in monkeys (e.g. Easton et al. 2002; Fine et al. 1997; Ridley et al. 1999), and lesions of the basal forebrain produce a profound amnesia in humans (e.g. Deluca and Diamond 1995; Norlen and Olivecrona 1953). However, cholinergic cells are not the only cells present within this region of the basal forebrain, and damage in animals and humans has rarely been restricted to the MS/VDB and even more rarely to only the cholinergic projections from this region. As a result, the necessary involvement of these cholinergic cells in memory has been much debated (e.g. Baxter and Chiba 1999; Easton et al. 2012a; Hasselmo 2006; Parent and Baxter 2004), with evidence that the role of acetylcholine may be more specific to attentional mechanisms than memory per se (e.g. Baxter and Chiba 1999). It is therefore very important when assessing the impact of cholinergic manipulations on memory to consider what is meant by memory and what is being modelled. As in much of neuroscience, the issue of translation from animal research into the clinic is a key concern. It is essential that we move away, therefore, from considering the debate to be one of acetylcholine’s involvement in broadly describ
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