A Single Pyramidal-Cell and Network Computational Model of the Hippocampal CA3 Region

The hippocampal formation consists of the dentate gyrus, the Cornu Ammonis (CA) subregions (also called hippocampus proper or Ammon's horn), the subiculum, and the entorhinal cortex. There are four histological subdivisions in the CA, namely: CA1, CA2, CA3 and CA4. Subarea CA3 has drawn attention for its major role in encoding spatial representations and episodic memories [1, 2]. Due to the presence of rich recurrent feedback connections, CA3 has been considered to play a key role in long-term memory formation. Moreover, CA3 has long been proposed as an auto-associative network capable of pattern completion and path integration for the retrieval and storage of episodic/declarative memory traces [3, 4]. It was hypothesised that a memory can be recalled using only a part of the memory as a cue [5]. CA3 may therefore be characterised as a pattern-completion network which auto-associatively matches new information coming from the entorhinal cortex with familiar experiences.