Journal
JOURNAL OF NEUROSCIENCE
Volume 35, Issue 13, Pages 5180-5186Publisher
SOC NEUROSCIENCE
DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1958-14.2015
Keywords
distributed representation; human single neuron; medial temporal lobe; object representation
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health Grant [1R21DC009871-0]
- Barrow Neurological Foundation
- Arizona Biomedical Research Institute [09084092]
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It remains unclear how single neurons in the human brain represent whole-object visual stimuli. While recordings in both human and nonhuman primates have shown distributed representations of objects (many neurons encoding multiple objects), recordings of single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe, taken as subjects' discriminated objects during multiple presentations, have shown gnostic representations (single neurons encoding one object). Because some studies suggest that repeated viewing may enhance neural selectivity for objects, we had human subjects discriminate objects in a single, more naturalistic viewing session. We found that, across 432 well isolated neurons recorded in the hippocampus and amygdala, the average fraction of objects encoded was 26%. We also found that more neurons encoded several objects versus only one object in the hippocampus (28 vs 18%, p < 0.001) and in the amygdala (30 vs 19%, p < 0.001). Thus, during realistic viewing experiences, typical neurons in the human medial temporal lobe code for a considerable range of objects, across multiple semantic categories.
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