Two Papers Make 'Best of Neuron' List
The journal Neuron recently chose its 12 best articles of 2014-15, including two from UC Davis teams engaged in the study of memory. The authors included two faculty members: Charan Ranganath, professor, and Brian Wiltgin, associate professor — both of the Department of Psychology and the Center for Neuroscience.
- “States of Curiosity Modulate Hippocampus-Dependent Learning via the Dopaminergic Circuit” — Ranganath and co-authors Matthias Gruber, postdoctoral researcher, and Bernard Gelman, research scientist, wrote about the role of curiosity in learning and memory.
- “Cortical Representations Are Reinstated by the Hippocampus during Memory Retrieval” — Wiltgen and co-authors Kazumasa Tanaka, Anahita Hamidi, Yuki Nakazawa and Jalina Graham, all of the Center for Neuroscience, told how they used light to erase specific memories in mice, and proved a basic theory of how different parts of the brain work together to retrieve episodic memories.
The journal reprinted the articles in the Best of Neuron series. The editors, in a forward, noted the articles were among the journal’s most downloaded documents of the year and span “the most exciting research of last year.”