The hippocampus has long been considered a critical substrate in the neurobiology, neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience of memory. Over the past few decades, a number of ground-breaking theoretical and methodological advances have radically enhanced our understanding of the structure and function of the hippocampus and revolutionized the neuroscientific study of memory. Cutting across disciplines and approaches, these advances offer novel insights into the molecular and cellular structure and physiology of the hippocampus, the role of hippocampus in the formation, (re)consolidation, enhancement, and retrieval of memory across time and development, and permit investigators to address questions about how the hippocampus interacts, functionally and anatomically, with other neural systems in service of memory. In addition, recent investigations also suggest that the mechanistic properties and functional processing features of the hippocampus permit broader contributions to cognition, beyond memory, to the domains of attention, decision-making, language, social cognition, and a variety of other capacities that are critical for flexible cognition and behavior. These advances have profound implications for the neurobiology and cognitive neuroscience of hippocampus dependent cognition and for the numerous psychiatric and neurological diseases and disorders for which hippocampal pathology is a hallmark such as Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia. The goal of this book is to bring together in a single source an integrated review of these advances providing state of the art treatment on the structure and function of the hippocampus. Contributors will examine the hippocampus from a variety of levels (from cells to systems) using a wide range of methods (from neurobiological approaches in non-human animals to neuroimaging and neuropsychological work in humans).

The book reviews recent progress in understanding forms of memory in animals and humans and the interaction of cortical and subcortical systems in the regulation of memory. It will be an invaluable source for cognitive psychologists, neuroscientists, and students.

The questions of how a large population of neurons in the brain functions, how synchronized firing of neurons is achieved, and what factors regulate how many and which neurons fire under different conditions form the central theme of this book. Important neurological techniques for the physiological reconstruction of a large biological neural network are presented.

Data from neuropsychological and animal research suggest that the hippocampus plays a pivotal role in two relatively different areas: active navigation, as well as episodic learning and memory. Recent studies have attempted to bridge these disparate accounts of hippocampal function by emphasizing the role that hippocampal place cells may play in processing the spatial contextual information that defines situations in which learned behaviors occur. A number of established laboratories are currently offering complementary interpretations of place fields, and this book will present the first common platform for them. Bringing together research from behavioral, genetic, physiological, computational, and neural-systems perspectives will provide a thorough understanding of the extent to which studying place-field properties has informed our understanding of the neural mechanisms of hippocampus-dependent memory. Hippocampal Place Fields: Relevance to Learning and Memory will serve as a valuable reference for everyone interested in hippocampal function.

The hippocampus is one of a group of remarkable structures embedded within the brain's medial temporal lobe. Long known to be important for memory, it has been a prime focus of neuroscience research for many years. The Hippocampus Book promises to facilitate developments in the field in a major way by bringing together, for the first time, contributions by leading international scientists knowledgeable about hippocampal anatomy, physiology, and function. This authoritative volume offers the most comprehensive, up-to-date account of what the hippocampus does, how it does it, and what happens when things go wrong. At the same time, it illustrates how research focusing on this single brain structure has revealed principles of wider generality for the whole brain in relation to anatomical connectivity, synaptic plasticity, cognition and behavior, and computational algorithms. Well-organized in its presentation of both theory and experimental data, this peerless work vividly illustrates the astonishing progress that has been made in unraveling the workings of the brain. The Hippocampus Book is destined to take a central place on every neuroscientist's bookshelf.

These books are the result of a conviction held by the editors, authors, and publisher that the time is appropriate for assembling in one place information about functions of the hippocampus derived from many varied lines of research. Because of the explosion of research into the anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and behavioral aspects of the hip pocampus, some means of synthesis of the results from these lines of research was called for. We first thought of a conference. In fact, officials in the National Institute of Mental Health suggested we organize such a conference on the hippocampus, but after a few tentative steps in this direction, interest at the federallevel waned, probably due to the decreases in federal support for research in the basic health sciences so keenly feit in recent years. However, the editors also had co me to the view that conferences are mainly valuabIe to the participants. The broad range of students (of all ages) of brain behavior relations do not profit from conference proceedings unless the proceedings are subsequently published. Furthermore, conferences dealing with the functional character of organ systems approached from many points of view are most successful after participants have become acquainted with each other's work. Therefore, we believe that a book is the best format for disseminating information, and that its publication can be the stimulus for many future conferences.

In this text, Neal J. Cohen and Howard Eichenbaum bring together converging findings from neuropsychology, neuroscience and cognitive science that provide the critical clues and constraints for developing a more comprehensive understanding of memory. Specifically, they offer a cognitive neuroscience theory of memory that accounts for the nature of memory impairment exhibited in human amnesia and animal models of amnesia, that specifies the functional role played by the hippocampal system in memory, and that provides further understanding of the componential structure of memory.