Computational Models of Memory Formation in Healthy and Diseased Microcircuits of the Hippocampus

The hippocampus, one of the most widely studied brain region, plays an important role in the formation, storage and recall, of declarative memories. Over the years hippocampus research has yielded a wealth of data on network architecture, cell types, cell properties, connectivity, and synaptic plasticity. Understanding the functional roles of different families of hippocampal neurons in information processing, spike timing, synaptic plasticity and network oscillations poses a great challenge, but also promises deep insight into the computations performed by one of the major brain systems. Computational and mathematical models play an instrumental role in exploring such functions. In this paper, we provide an overview of abstract and biophysically detailed microcircuit models of associative memory with particular emphasis on the operations performed by the diverse (inter)neurons in encoding and retrieval of memories in the hippocampus in both health and disease.