Contrasting hippocampal and perirhinal cortex function using immediate early gene imaging

The perirhinal cortex and hippocampus have close anatomical links, and it might, therefore, be predicted that they have close, interlinked roles in memory. Lesion studies have, however, often failed to support this prediction, providing dissociations and double dissociations between the two regions on tests of object recognition and spatial memory. In a series of rat studies we have compared these two regions using the expression of the immediate early gene c-fos as a marker of neuronal activity. This gene imaging approach makes it possible to assess the relative involvement of different brain regions and avoids many of the limitations of the lesion approach. A very consistent pattern of results was found as the various hippocampal subfields but not the perirhinal cortex show increased c-fos activity following tests of spatial learning. In contrast, the perirhinal cortex but none of the hippocampal subfields show increased c-fos activity when presented with novel rather than familiar visual objects. When novel scenes are created by the spatial rearrangement of familiar objects it is the hippocampus and not the perirhinal cortex that shows c-fos changes. This double dissociation for gene expression accords with that found from lesion studies and highlights the different contributions of the perirhinal cortex and hippocampus to memory.