Dietary supplementation of Hericium erinaceus on spatial memory in wild-type mice.

Hericium erinaceus (Hr, Bull.) Pers. is an edible and medicinal mushroom with potential neuroprotective effects. The study of Hr has attracted considerable attention during the past 10 years regarding its potential utility in the treatment of motor dysfunction, Alzheimer’s disease, and other forms of dementia. Previously, we determined that oral supplementation with Hr results in significant improvements in novelty seeking and novel object recognition in mice. In the current study, Hr was added to the diets of wild-type mice for 2 months, and effects on spatial memory were evaluated by means of a Y maze and an object location task. We found that Hr increased general locomotor activity but had no effect on spatial memory function. Thus, oral supplementation with Hr yields specific and selective improvements in recognition memory without altering spatial working memory, which supports the hypothesis that recognition memory can be modeled as a dual process. In this model, the perirhinal cortex supports the recognition of individual items as part of a circuit involved in familiarity toward an encountered stimulus, whereas the hippocampus supports recollected associations and relationships between stimuli.