The entorhinal cortex (EC) is a major part of the hippocampal formation of the brain, and is reciprocally connected with the hippocampus.
[1] The hippocampal formation, which consists of the hippocampus, perirhinal cortex, the dentate gyrus, the subicular areas and the EC forms one of the most important parts of the limbic system.
The entorhinal cortex is an infolding of the parahippocampal gyrus into the inferior (temporal) horn of the lateral ventricle.
Studies, with human patients and with experimental animals, suggest that knowledge stored as explicit memory is first acquired through processing in one or more of the three polymodal association cortices (prefrontal, limbic, and parieto-occipital-temporal) to form visual, auditory and somatic information.
The EC has dual functions in processing information for explicit memory storage: First, it is the main input to the hippocampus.