In recent years, there have been intensive debates on whether healthy adults acquire new word knowledge through fast mapping (FM) by a different mechanism from explicit encoding (EE). In this study, we focused on this issue and investigated to what extent reteninterval, prior knowledge (PK), and lure type modulated memory after FM and EE. Healthy…

Learning to navigate toward a goal is an essential skill. Place learning is thought to rely on the ability of animals to associate the location of a goal with surrounding environmental cues. Using the Morris water maze, a task popularly used to examine place learning, we demonstrate that distal cues provide animals with distance and directional…

The hippocampus has been proposed to support a cognitive map, a mental representation of the spatial layout of an environment as well as the nonspatial items encountered in that environment. In the present study, we recorded simultaneously from 43 to 61 hippocampal pyramidal cells as rats performed an object recognition memory task in which novel…

Humans and animals form internal representations of external space based on their own body movement (dead reckoning) as well as external landmarks. It is poorly understood, however, how different types of information are integrated to form a unified representation of external space. To examine the role of dentate gyrus (DG) in this process, we…