Pretraining septal driving of hippocampal rhythmic slow activity facilitates acquisition of visual discrimination

Studies have shown hippocampal rhythmic slow activity (H-RSA) to reflect both learning and memory processes across a variety of species and conditioning procedures. In order to investigate these relations further. H-RSA was manipulated by medial septal (MS) stimulation directly before training rats for light/dark discrimination in a T-maze. Rats that had H-RSA increased learned the discrimination significantly faster than those that had H-RSA blocked and control rats. In addition, increase in H-RSA before training was found to correlate with speed of learning. The evidence of this study is consistent with results of other studies showing septal-hippocampal interaction during learning. The results also support the view that H-RSA may be a neurophysiological representation of learning and memory processes.