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Reducing sensory experiences during the period that immediately follows learning improves long-term memory retention in healthy humans, and even preserves memory in patients with amnesia. To date, it is entirely unclear why this is the case, and identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning this effect requires suitable animal models, which are currently lacking. Here, we describe a straightforward experimental procedure in rats that future studies can use to directly address this issue. Using this method, we replicated the central findings on quiet wakefulness obtained in humans: We show that rats that spent 1 h alone in a familiar dark and quiet chamber (the Black Box) after exploring two objects in an open field expressed long-term memory for the object locations 6 h later, while rats that instead directly went back into their home cage with their cage mates did not. We discovered that both visual stimulation and being together with conspecifics contributed to the memory loss in the home cage, as exposing rats either to light or to a cage mate in the Black Box was sufficient to disrupt memory for object locations. Our results suggest that in both rats and humans, everyday sensory experiences that normally follow learning in natural settings can interfere with processes that promote long-term memory retention, thereby causing forgetting in form of retroactive interference. The processes involved in this effect are not sleep-dependent because we prevented sleep in periods of reduced sensory experience. Our findings, which also have implications for research practices, describe a potentially useful method to study the neurobiological mechanisms that might explain why normal sensory processing after learning impairs memory both in healthy humans and in patients suffering from amnesia.

A fundamental property of place cells in the hippocampus is the anchoring of their firing fields to salient landmarks within the environment. However, it is unclear how such information reaches the hippocampus. In the current experiment, we tested the hypothesis that the stimulus control exerted by distal visual landmarks requires input from the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC). Place cells were recorded from mice with ibotenic acid lesions of the MEC (n = 7) and from sham‐lesioned mice (n = 6) following 90° rotations of either distal landmarks or proximal cues in a cue‐ controlled environment. We found that lesions of the MEC impaired the anchoring of place fields to distal landmarks, but not proximal cues. We also observed that, relative to sham‐lesioned mice, place cells in animals with MEC lesions exhibited significantly reduced spatial information and increased sparsity. These results support the view that distal landmark information reaches the hippocampus via the MEC, but that proximal cue information can do so via an alternative neural pathway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reducing sensory experiences during the period that immediately follows learning improves long-term memory retention in healthy humans, and even preserves memory in patients with amnesia. To date, it is entirely unclear why this is the case, and identifying the neurobiological mechanisms underpinning this effect requires suitable animal models, which are currently lacking. Here, we describe a straightforward experimental procedure in rats that future studies can use to directly address this issue. Using this method, we replicated the central findings on quiet wakefulness obtained in humans: We show that rats that spent 1 h alone in a familiar dark and quiet chamber (the Black Box) after exploring two objects in an open field expressed long-term memory for the object locations 6 h later, while rats that instead directly went back into their home cage with their cage mates did not. We discovered that both visual stimulation and being together with conspecifics contributed to the memory loss in the home cage, as exposing rats either to light or to a cage mate in the Black Box was sufficient to disrupt memory for object locations. Our results suggest that in both rats and humans, everyday sensory experiences that normally follow learning in natural settings can interfere with processes that promote long-term memory retention, thereby causing forgetting in form of retroactive interference. The processes involved in this effect are not sleep-dependent because we prevented sleep in periods of reduced sensory experience. Our findings, which also have implications for research practices, describe a potentially useful method to study the neurobiological mechanisms that might explain why normal sensory processing after learning impairs memory both in healthy humans and in patients suffering from amnesia., (© 2021 Arkell et al.; Published by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press.)