Long-term coding of personal and universal associations underlying the memory web in the human brain

De Falco, Emanuela; Ison, Matias J.; Fried, Itzhak; Quian Quiroga, Rodrigo

Abstract

Neurons in the medial temporal lobe (MTL), a critical area for declarative memory, have been shown to change their tuning in associative learning tasks. Yet, it is unclear how durable these neuronal representations are and if they outlast the execution of the task. To address this issue, we studied the responses of MTL neurons in neurosurgical patients to known concepts (people and places). Using association scores provided by the patients and a web-based metric, here we show that whenever MTL neurons respond to more than one concept, these concepts are typically related. Furthermore, the degree of association between concepts could be successfully predicted based on the neurons’ response patterns. These results provide evidence for a long-term involvement of MTL neurons in the representation of durable associations, a hallmark of human declarative memory.

Citation

De Falco, E., Ison, M. J., Fried, I., & Quian Quiroga, R. (2016). Long-term coding of personal and universal associations underlying the memory web in the human brain. Nature Communications, 7, Article 13408. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13408

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Sep 30, 2016
• Publication Date: Nov 15, 2016
• Deposit Date: Jul 31, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jul 31, 2017
• Journal: Nature Communications
• Electronic ISSN: 2041-1723
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Article Number: 13408
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13408
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/828454
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms13408
• Contract Date: Jul 31, 2017