Current Biology
Volume 28, Issue 14, 23 July 2018, Pages 2283-2290.e3
Journal home page for Current Biology

Article
Recovery of “Lost” Infant Memories in Mice

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2018.05.059Get rights and content
Under an Elsevier user license
open archive

Highlights

  • Infant, but not adult, mice forget contextual fear memories (infantile forgetting)

  • Stimulation of dentate gyrus encoding ensembles recovers lost memories in adulthood

  • Memory recovery was observed up to 3 months following training

  • Memory recovery was associated with reactivation of hippocampal and cortical neurons

Summary

Hippocampus-dependent, event-related memories formed in early infancy in human and non-human animals are rapidly forgotten. Recently we found that high levels of hippocampal neurogenesis contribute to accelerated rates of forgetting during infancy. Here, we ask whether these memories formed in infancy are permanently erased (i.e., storage failure) or become progressively inaccessible with time (i.e., retrieval failure). To do this, we developed an optogenetic strategy that allowed us to permanently express channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2) in neuronal ensembles that were activated during contextual fear encoding in infant mice. We then asked whether reactivation of ChR2-tagged ensembles in the dentate gyrus was sufficient for memory recovery in adulthood. We found that optogenetic stimulation of tagged dentate gyrus neurons recovered “lost” infant memories up to 3 months following training and that memory recovery was associated with broader reactivation of tagged hippocampal and cortical neuronal ensembles.

Keywords

infantile amnesia
childhood amnesia
forgetting
engram
memory
hippocampus
dentate gyrus
pattern completion
optogenetics

Cited by (0)

7

Lead Contact