Differential laminar activation dissociates encoding and retrieval in the human medial and lateral entorhinal cortex.

The hierarchically organized structures of the medial temporal lobe are critically important for episodic memory function. Accumulating evidence suggests dissociable information processing pathways are maintained throughout these structures including in the medial and lateral entorhinal cortex. Cortical layers provide an additional dimension of dissociation as the primary input to the hippocampus derives from layer-2 neurons in the entorhinal cortex while the deeper layers primarily receive output from the hippocampus. Here, novel high-resolution T2-prepared functional MRI methods were successfully employed to mitigate susceptibility artifacts typically affecting MRI signals in this region providing uniform sensitivity across the medial and lateral entorhinal cortex. During the performance of a memory task, healthy human subjects (age 25 to 33 years, mean age 28.2 ± 3.3 years, 4 female) showed differential functional activation in the superficial and deep layers of the entorhinal cortex associated with task-related encoding and retrieval conditions respectively. The methods provided here offer an approach to probe layer-specific activation in normal cognition and conditions contributing to memory impairment. Significance Statement This study provides new evidence for differential neuronal activation in the superficial versus deep layers of the entorhinal cortex associated with encoding and retrieval memory processes respectively in cognitively normal adults. The study further shows that this dissociation can be observed in both the medial and the lateral entorhinal cortex. The study was achieved by employing a novel functional MRI method allowing us to measure robust functional MRI signals in both the medial and lateral entorhinal cortex that was not possible in previous studies. The methodology established here in healthy human subjects lays a solid foundation for subsequent studies investigating layer-specific and region-specific changes in the entorhinal cortex associated with memory impairment in various conditions such as Alzheimer's disease.