Hippocampus, temporal context and taste memories

What is it about?

Human research points to the relevance of the hippocampus for episodic memory, i.e. the ability to remember unique events that took place at a particular time and place (Tulving, 2002). The study of the hippocampal involvement in animal models of episodic memory faces several pitfalls (Eichenbaum and Fortin, 2003). As an alternative animal model, episodic-like taste memories may be studied using taste recognition memory tasks (Bermúdez-Rattoni, 2004). As it is required for an animal model of episodic memory, taste memories are bound to the context in which learning occurred. This has been shown both for safe and aversive taste memories. On one hand, the contextual dependency of latent inhibition (LI), i.e. the fact that previous taste exposure without consequences interferes with later learning (Lubow, 1989), indicates that the safe taste memory includes contextual cues. A context change between preexposure and conditioning disrupts LI (Hall and Channell, 1986). On the other hand, retrieval of an aversive taste memory may be context-dependent (Bonardi et al., 1990; Loy et al., 1993), mainly when the taste was previously exposed without consequences (Puente et al., 1988; Boakes et al., 1997). This conditional discrimination task shows that context cues may facilitate retrieval either of the safe or the aversive taste memory trace.

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