Firing Pattern of Cells in the Hippocampus and Basolateral Amygdala during Novelty Recognition

Novelty recognition is essential for exploring and collecting unknown but interesting information, in which multiple brain regions related to cognitive memory are involved. Dorsal hippocampus (dHPC) is revealed to be closely associated with spatial memory and basolateral amygdala (BLA) is reported recently to be related to state-dependent encoding of exploratory behavior. However, how the firing pattern of cells in these two brain regions responds to novelty dynamically remains unclear. In this study, we observed that the representations of cells in BLA exhibited shift towards novelty, whereas dHPC cells maintained strong stability after the introduction of novelty, which are both engaged in the execution of novel recognition. Our study may provide new evidence for underlying the internal mechanisms of perception of novelty in the brain.