Hippocampus and Sequence Learning

Professor Howard Eichenbaum outlines the importance of the hippocampus to learning sequences of events.

So one of the components of our capacity to recollect our experience from the past, cognitive scientists tell us, is our ability to mentally replay an experience from the past – to play it back as if it were a video tape. And of course within such a video tape, there is a strong temporal component – a sequence of events that occurred in a particular way that characterizes certain experiences. Recent studies have shown that the hippocampus is critical for animals' ability to remember the order in which a sequence of experiences occurred, even though it’s not essential to remember or be familiar with the events themselves independently of their order. Similarly, neurons in the hippocampus form a relationship in the order of events that occur within a specific experience.