ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, FRANK RAMSPOTT
The brain is a master of forming patterns, even when it involves events occurring at different times. Take the phenomenon of trace fear conditioning—scientists can get an animal to notice the relationship between a neutral stimulus and an aversive stimulus separated by a temporal chasm (the trace) of a few or even tens of seconds. While it’s a well-established protocol in neuroscience and psychology labs, the mechanism for how the brain bridges the time gap between two related stimuli in order to associate them is “one of the most enigmatic and highly investigated” questions, says Columbia University neuroscientist Attila Losonczy.
If the first stimulus is finished, the information about its presence and identity “should be somehow maintained through some neuronal mechanism,” he explains, so it can be associated with the second stimulus coming later.
Losonczy and his colleagues have recently investigated how this might occur ...
