Hippocampus and neocortex send and receive predictive information.

A recent paper published in Nature by Yadav and colleagues (Nature 608 (7921): 153-160, 2022) illustrates a fundamental aspect on how different brain areas participate in memory storage and retrieval. After identifying neuron activity in the hippocampus CA1 region specific to multi-modal stimuli that predicted appetitive and aversive unconditioned stimuli (conjunctive stimulus encoding), the authors showed that neurons located in the anterior cingulate cortex dynamically encode the discrete sensory features of the outcome-predictive stimuli during training, and these highly specific feature-based projections can excite or inhibit conjunctive-coding neurons in the hippocampus during retrieval.