Abstract
Imagine how flicking through your photo album and seeing a picture of a beach sunset brings back fond memories of a tasty cocktail you had that night. Computational models suggest that upon receiving a partial memory cue (‘beach’), neurons in the hippocampus coordinate reinstatement of associated memories (‘cocktail’) in cortical target sites. Here, using human single neuron recordings, we show that hippocampal firing rates are elevated from ~ 500–1500 ms after cue onset during successful associative retrieval. Concurrently, the retrieved target object can be decoded from population spike patterns in adjacent entorhinal cortex (EC), with hippocampal firing preceding EC spikes and predicting the fidelity of EC object reinstatement. Prior to orchestrating reinstatement, a separate population of hippocampal neurons distinguishes different scene cues (buildings vs. landscapes). These results elucidate the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit dynamics for memory recall and reconcile disparate views on the role of the hippocampus in scene processing vs. associative memory.
Highlights
Imagine how flicking through your photo album and seeing a picture of a beach sunset brings back fond memories of a tasty cocktail you had that night
Our first analysis focused on the hippocampus, where we recorded from 238 neurons in the anterior portion across the 16 participants (Fig. 2a; M ± SEM per participant: 14.9 ± 2.6 neurons)
Our results reconcile two seemingly incompatible views on hippocampal function, emphasizing either perceptual/ constructive scene processing[5,6,7] or associative/relational memory processing8,10—both functions appear to co-exist, but are carried out by different subpopulations and unfold at different time points in the course of memory retrieval
Summary
Imagine how flicking through your photo album and seeing a picture of a beach sunset brings back fond memories of a tasty cocktail you had that night. A separate population of hippocampal neurons distinguishes different scene cues (buildings vs landscapes). These results elucidate the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit dynamics for memory recall and reconcile disparate views on the role of the hippocampus in scene processing vs associative memory. Before orchestrating object reinstatement in EC, a separate population of hippocampal neurons distinguishes different scene cue types (buildings vs landscapes) in both tasks (NAM and AM). These results reconcile competing models of hippocampal function (scene processing vs associative memory) and elucidate the hippocampal-entorhinal circuit dynamics in service of human memory recall
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