The role of hippocampal - prefrontal interactions in cognition has been most clearly established in spatial memory tasks in rodents. These regions play complementary and overlapping roles in memory, with the hippocampus being critical for encoding, storage and retrieval of new memories [4], and the medial prefrontal cortex playing an integral role in long-term memory, retrieval, and working memory [5,6]. In addition, both of these regions are thought to be major components of the neural circuitry underlying planning, imagination and memory-guided decision making [7–9]. The term “functional interactions” has often been used to convey that these regions are co-active during cognitive processing, indicating coordination and communication of activity [9]. However, the neurophysiological mechanisms that enable neurons in distributed circuits to coordinate their activity, and the functional role that this coordinated activity plays in cognition, is still under investigation.
