Olga Vinogradova

Who was Olga Vinogradova?

Professor Olga S. Vinogradova was a specialist in Russian cognitive neuroscience. In 1969 she founded the Laboratory of Systemic Organization of Neurons in the Institute of Biological Physics, Russian Academy of Sciences and headed this Laboratory till the end of her life.

From the early days of her scientific career, Prof. Vinogradova was fortunate to work with prominent neuropsychologist and neuroscientists. She studied psychology under the supervision of Prof. Alexander Luria, investigated psychophysiology of the orienting reflex with Prof. Evgeny Sokolov, and learned electrophysiology from Prof. Jan Bures.

On the basis of extracellular unit recording from the hippocampus and other relevant structures in awake animals during sensory and electrical stimulation, she developed a hypothesis of information processing in the limbic system. She concluded that the hippocampus is at the core of orienting reflex and works as a comparator determining whether information should be stored in memory or ignored. These ideas were developed in her books Orienting Reflex and Its Neurophysiological Mechanisms and Hippocampus and Memory, and later published in English as a chapter of the book Hippocampus and the review Hippocampus as Comparator System.