ArticlePLoS biology2019
Representation of abstract semantic knowledge in populations of human single neurons in the medial temporal lobe.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 42 papers.
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Who cites it
42 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients.Scientific data · 2026Article
- Decoding Naturalistic Episodic Memory with Artificial Intelligence and Brain-Machine Interface.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2026Article
- Categorization is 'baked' into the brain.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2026Review
- Concept Cells and the Neural Bases of Human Memory.Acta physiologica (Oxford, England) · 2026Review
- Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- Spatial and semantic memory reorganize a hippocampal long-axis gradient.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Distributed Temporal Coding of Visual Memory Categories in Human Hippocampal Neurons Revealed by an Interpretable Decoding Model.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2025Article
- Feature-based encoding of face identity by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Single-neuron datasets for linguistic and semantic processing in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Phase of firing does not reflect temporal order in sequence memory of humans and recurrent neural networks.Nature neuroscience · 2025Article
- A unified neural representation model for spatial and conceptual computations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A neuronal code for object representation and memory in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A human single-neuron dataset for object recognition.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Single-neuron spiking variability in hippocampus dynamically tracks sensory content during memory formation in humans.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Domain-specific representation of social inference by neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Science advances · 2024Article
- Correlates of implicit semantic processing as revealed by representational similarity analysis applied to EEG.iScience · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- Concept and location neurons in the human brain provide the 'what' and 'where' in memory formation.Nature communications · 2024Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Sensory experience elicits complex activity patterns throughout the neocortex. Projections from the neocortex converge onto the medial temporal lobe (MTL), in which distributed neocortical firing patterns are distilled into sparse representations. The precise nature of these neuronal representations is still unknown. Here, we show that population activity patterns in the MTL are governed by high levels of semantic abstraction. We recorded human single-unit activity in the MTL (4,917 units, 25 patients) while subjects viewed 100 images grouped into 10 semantic categories of 10 exemplars each. High levels of semantic abstraction were indicated by representational similarity analyses (RSAs) of patterns elicited by individual stimuli. Moreover, pattern classifiers trained to decode semantic categories generalised successfully to unseen exemplars, and classifiers trained to decode exemplar identity more often confused exemplars of the same versus different categories. Semantic abstraction and generalisation may thus be key to efficiently distill the essence of an experience into sparse representations in the human MTL. Although semantic abstraction is efficient and may facilitate generalisation of knowledge to novel situations, it comes at the cost of a loss of detail and may be central to the generation of false memories.
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