Subregional activity in the dentate gyrus is amplified during elevated cognitive demands

Neural activity in the dentate gyrus (DG) is required for the detection and discrimination of novelty, context and patterns, amongst other cognitive processes. Prior work has demonstrated that there are differences in the activation of granule neurons in the supra and infrapyramidal blades of the DG during a range of hippocampal dependent tasks. Here we used an automated touch screen pattern separation task combined to temporally controlled tagging of active neurons to determine how performance in a cognitively demanding task affected patterns of neural activity in the DG. We found an increase in the blade-biased activity of suprapyramidal mature granule cells (mGCs) during the performance of a high cognitive demand segment of the task, with a further characteristic distribution of active neurons along the apex to blade, and hilar to molecular layer axes. Chemogenetic inhibition of adult-born granule cells (abDGCs) beyond a critical window of their maturation significantly impaired performance of mice during high-demand conditions but not when cognitive demand was low. abDGC inhibition also elevated the total activity of mGCs and disturbed the patterned distribution of active mGCs even in mice that eventually succeeded in the task. Conversely chemogenetic inhibition of mGCs reduced success in the high cognitive demand portion of this task and decreased the global number of active GCs without affecting the patterned distribution of active cells. These findings demonstrate how a high cognitive demand pattern separation task preferentially activates mGCs in subregions of the DG and are consistent with a modulatory role for abDGCs on the dentate circuit which in part governs the spatially organized patterns of activity of mGCs.