In: Cognitive Psychology, 2013, vol. 66, no. 1, p. 1–29
Episodic memories for autobiographical events that happen in unique spatiotemporal contexts are central to defining who we are. Yet, before 2 years of age, children are unable to form or store episodic memories for recall later in life, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Here, we studied the development of allocentric spatial memory, a fundamental component of episodic memory, in two...
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In: Translational Psychiatry, 2012, vol. 2, p. e173
The hippocampal formation is essential for normal memory function and is implicated in many neurodevelopmental, neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. In particular, abnormalities in hippocampal structure and function have been identified in schizophrenic subjects. Schizophrenia has a strong polygenic component, but the role of numerous susceptibility genes in normal brain development...
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In: The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2012, vol. 520, no. 16, p. 3745–3763
The amygdala is the central component of a functional brain system regulating fear and emotional behaviors. Studies of the ontogeny of fear behaviors reveal the emergence of distinct fear responses at different postnatal ages. Here, we performed a stereological analysis of the rat amygdala to characterize the cellular changes underlying its normal structural development. Distinct amygdala nuclei...
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In: PLoS ONE, 2012, vol. 7, no. 8, p. e43435
Regulation of gene expression in the postnatally developing hippocampus might contribute to the emergence of selective memory function. However, the mechanisms that underlie the co-regulation of expression of hundreds of genes in different cell types at specific ages in distinct hippocampal regions have yet to be elucidated. By performing genome-wide microarray analyses of gene expression in...
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In: The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2012, p. -
Abnormal development of the amygdala has been linked to several neurodevelopmental disorders, including schizophrenia and autism. However, the postnatal development of the amygdala is not easily explored at the cellular level in humans. Here, we performed a stereological analysis of the macaque monkey amygdala in order to characterize the cellular changes underlying its normal structural...
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In: The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2011, vol. 519, no. 16, p. 3218–3239
The amygdala is part of a neural network that contributes to the regulation of emotional behaviors. Rodents, especially rats, are used extensively as model organisms to decipher the functions of specific amygdala nuclei, in particular in relation to fear and emotional learning. Analysis of the role of the nonhuman primate amygdala in these functions has lagged work in the rodent but provides...
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In: Behavioural Brain Research, 2011, vol. 219, no. 1, p. 132-141
We aimed to determine whether human subjects’ reliance on different sources of spatial information encoded in different frames of reference (i.e., egocentric versus allocentric) affects their performance, decision time and memory capacity in a short-term spatial memory task performed in the real world. Subjects were asked to play the Memory game (a.k.a. the Concentration game) without an...
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In: The Journal of Comparative Neurology, 2011, p. -
We performed a stereological analysis of neuron number, neuronal soma size, and volume of individual regions and layers of the macaque monkey hippocampal formation during early postnatal development. We found a protracted period of neuron addition in the dentate gyrus throughout the first postnatal year and a concomitant late maturation of the granule cell population and individual dentate...
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In: European Journal of Neuroscience, 2010, vol. 31, no. 2, p. 273-285
The dentate gyrus is one of only two regions of the mammalian brain where substantial neurogenesis occurs postnatally. However, detailed quantitative information about the postnatal structural maturation of the primate dentate gyrus is meager. We performed design-based, stereological studies of neuron number and size, and volume of the dentate gyrus layers in rhesus macaque monkeys (Macaca...
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In: Behavioural Brain Research, 2010, vol. 207, no. 1, p. 125-137
This study assesses gender differences in spatial and non-spatial relational learning and memory in adult humans behaving freely in a real-world, open-field environment. In Experiment 1, we tested the use of proximal landmarks as conditional cues allowing subjects to predict the location of rewards hidden in one of two sets of three distinct locations. Subjects were tested in two different...
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