New paper on functional footprints published in PNAS!

We are very excited to share Melisa Gumus' paper, "Distinct contributions of hippocampal pathways in learning regularities and exceptions revealed by functional footprints", recently published in PNAS. In this work, Melisa proposes a new method that localizes hippocampal pathways with diffusion weighted imaging to interrogate their distinct functional signatures during category learning. She finds that whereas category regularities engage the monosynaptic pathway (i.e., the direct pathway between entorhinal cortex and hippocampal subfield CA1) early in learning, category exceptions engage the trisynaptic pathway (i.e., the pathway that loops in dentate gyrus and CA3) later in learning. These findings provide unique supporting evidence for the functional distinction for these pathways and offer a multimodal approach to further characterizing information flow in the brain. Fun fact: Melisa collected this dataset as an undergrad in 2018!

Read the paper and check out the press release!

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