Subregional activity in the dentate gyrus is amplified during elevated cognitive demands

Abstract

Neural activity in the dentate gyrus (DG) supports the detection and discrimination of novelty, context, and patterns. Granule cell activation differs between the supra- and infrapyramidal blades across hippocampal-dependent tasks, yet how excitatory dynamics shape this blade-specific bias under varying cognitive demands remains unclear. Here, we combined an automated touchscreen pattern separation task in mice with temporally controlled tagging of active neurons to determine how increasing cognitive demand influences spatial activity patterns in the DG. As task difficulty increased, activation became progressively biased toward the suprapyramidal blade and was accompanied by structured distributions of active mature granule cells (mGCs) along both the radial and transverse axes. Selective inhibition of mGCs did not alter these spatial patterns but profoundly impaired performance, as mice were no longer able to discriminate between closely spaced locations. In contrast, chemogenetic inhibition of adult-born granule cells (abDGCs) beyond a critical maturation window impaired performance under high-demand conditions, increased overall mGC activity, and disrupted blade-specific organization even in animals that successfully completed the task. These findings demonstrate that high cognitive demand recruits spatially organized mGC activity and support a modulatory role for abDGCs in shaping dentate circuit dynamics.