ENTONET · The organizational principles of human entorhinal cortex and their contributions to episodic memory

Episodic memory critically depends on the brain regions located in the medial temporal lobe. Anatomical studies in rodents and monkeys that studied the interactions between the hippocampus, the entorhinal cortex and the rest of the brain, positioned the entorhinal cortex as a key region mediating almost all interactions between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain. These anatomical studies were the provenance of a mechanistic model of episodic memory - the dual stream model. Over the last two decades, this model has become the most influential neuroanatomical and neurocognitive paradigm for studying episodic memory in human and non-human animals. However, recent human data suggest that critical anatomical properties of the entorhinal cortex were overlooked in prior research, inviting a reformulation of entorhinal cortex’s functional properties.Building on these findings, ENTONET will leverage precision neuroimaging, advanced MRI tools, computational modeling and animal anatomy to make a major breakthrough in our understanding of the functional properties of the human entorhinal cortex. To this end, ENTONET will comprise four work packages with the objective to study the human entorhinal cortex using fMRI across the human life-span. Using novel and unconventional experimental approaches, ENTONET will make dramatic contributions to developmental and clinical fields, and open new research horizons in the field of neuroscience of memory.