perience correlate with subsequent choices offers strong evidence for the existence of intrinsic preferences. Although it is not clear how malleable these preferences are, their existence may have health implications for the way in which individuals deal with events that are known to be unpleasant-for example, going to the doctor for painful procedures. The neurobiological mechanisms governing dreading behavior may hold clues for both better pain management and improvements in public health.

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The precise functional role of the hippocampus remains a topic of much debate. According to a dominant view, the dorsal/posterior hippocampus is implicated in memory and spatial navigation and the ventral/anterior hippocampus mediates anxietyrelated behaviours. However, this 'dichotomy view' may need revision. Gene expression studies demonstrate multiple functional domains along the hippocampal long axis, which often exhibit sharply demarcated borders. By contrast, anatomical studies and electrophysiological recordings in rodents suggest that the long-axis is organized along a gradient. Together, these observations suggest a model in which functional long-axis gradients are superimposed on discrete functional domains. This model provides a potential framework to explain and test the multiple functions ascribed to the hippocampus.The hippocampus is a medial temporal lobe structure critically involved in episodic memory and spatial navigation [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] . Its long, curved form is present across all mammalian orders and runs along a dorsal (septal) to ventral (temporal) axis in rodents, corresponding to a posteriorto-anterior axis in humans (FIG. 1a-b). The same basic intrinsic circuitry is maintained throughout the long axis and across species (FIG. 1c). Despite this conserved intrinsic circuitry, the dorsal and ventral portions have different connectivities with cortical and subcortical areas, and this has long posed a question as to whether the hippocampus is functionally uniform along this axis. Here we review cross-species data that show how the seemingly disparate functions ascribed to the hippocampus can be accommodated by a model in which different functional properties exist along the longitudinal axis.The severe memory impairment suffered by patient H.M. following bilateral hippocampal resection 1 led to intensive study 8 of patients and animal models with hippocampal damage, with an ensuing characterisation of hippocampal function in terms of declarative memory 2 , encompassing both episodic and semantic memory. At the same time, however, evidence emerged for a hippocampal role in spatial memory, based on the discovery of hippocampal 'place cells' 9,10 and the demonstration that hippocampal lesions impair spatial memory 4 . Both the declarative memory hypothesis 11 and the spatial mapping hypothesis 12 of hippocampal function proposed a unitary model in which the entire hippocampus is dedicated

Memory encoding occurs rapidly, but the consolidation of memory in the neocortex has long been held to be a more gradual process. We now report, however, that systems consolidation can occur extremely quickly if an associative “schema” into which new information is incorporated has previously been created. In experiments using a hippocampal-dependent paired-associate task for rats, the memory of flavor-place associations became persistent over time as a putative neocortical schema gradually developed. New traces, trained for only one trial, then became assimilated and rapidly hippocampal-independent. Schemas also played a causal role in the creation of lasting associative memory representations during one-trial learning. The concept of neocortical schemas may unite psychological accounts of knowledge structures with neurobiological theories of systems memory consolidation.

Conclusions. Our study is part of recent attempts in "neuroeconomics" and the "cognitive neuroscience of social behavior" to understand the social brain and the associated moral emotions (37-44). However, this study sought to identify the neural basis of the altruistic punishment of defectors. The ability to develop social norms that apply to large groups of genetically unrelated individuals and to enforce these norms through altruistic sanctions is one of the distinguishing characteristics of the human species. Altruistic punishment is probably a key element in explaining the unprecedented level of cooperation in human societies (1-3). We hypothesize that altruistic punishment provides relief or satisfaction to the punisher and activates, therefore, reward-related brain regions. Our design generates five contrasts in which this hypothesis can be tested, and the anterior dorsal striatum is activated in all five contrasts, which suggests that the caudate plays a decisive role in altruistic punishment. Caudate activation is particularly interesting because this brain region has been implicated in making decisions or taking actions that are motivated by anticipated rewards (17)(18)(19)(20). The prominent role of the caudate in altruistic punishment is further supported by the fact that those subjects who exhibit stronger caudate activation spend more money on punishing defectors. Moreover, our results also shed light on the reasons behind this correlation. Subjects who exhibit higher caudate activation at the maximal level of punishment if punishment is costless for them also spend more resources on punishment if punishment becomes costly. Thus, high caudate activation seems to be responsible for a high willingness to punish, which suggests that caudate activation reflects the anticipated satisfaction from punishing defectors. Our results therefore support recently developed social preference models (6-8), which assume that people have a preference for punishing norm violations, and illuminate the proximate mechanism behind evolutionary models of altruistic punishment. As the interface between hippocampus and neocortex, the entorhinal cortex is likely to play a pivotal role in memory. To determine how information is represented in this area, we measured spatial modulation of neural activity in layers of medial entorhinal cortex projecting to the hippocampus. Close to the postrhinal-entorhinal border, entorhinal neurons had stable and discrete multipeaked place fields, predicting the rat's location as accurately as place cells in the hippocampus. Precise positional modulation was not observed more ventromedially in the entorhinal cortex or upstream in the postrhinal cortex, suggesting that sensory input is transformed into durable allocentric spatial representations internally in the dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex.An extensive body of evidence suggests that the hippocampus is essential for fast encoding and storage of new episodic memories but has a more limited role in remote memory, which is thought to be st...