ArticleNature communications2021
Concept neurons in the human medial temporal lobe flexibly represent abstract relations between concepts.
Article in Nature communications, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 18 papers.
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18 citing papers in PubMed.
- Human neuron activity during an 83-minute movie from 2,286 neurons and 29 patients.Scientific data · 2026Article
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- Controlled Semantic Cognition: Precision Recordings Converge With in Silico Experiments to Reveal the Inner Workings of the Anterior Temporal Lobe Hub.Neurobiology of language (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2026Review
- Unattended working memory items are coded by persistent activity in human medial temporal lobe neurons.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Feature-based encoding of face identity by single neurons in the human amygdala and hippocampus.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- Reading specific memories from human neurons before and after sleep.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Models of human hippocampal specialization: a look at the electrophysiological evidence.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2025Review
- A unified neural representation model for spatial and conceptual computations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Persistent activity during working memory maintenance predicts long-term memory formation in the human hippocampus.Neuron · 2024Article
- Concept and location neurons in the human brain provide the 'what' and 'where' in memory formation.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Circuit dynamics of superficial and deep CA1 pyramidal cells and inhibitory cells in freely moving macaques.Cell reports · 2024Article
- Persistent activity during working memory maintenance predicts long-term memory formation in the human hippocampus.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Circuit dynamics of superficial and deep CA1 pyramidal cells and inhibitory cells in freely-moving macaques.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Article
- Single-neuron mechanisms of neural adaptation in the human temporal lobe.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Article
- Neurons detect cognitive boundaries to structure episodic memories in humans.Nature neuroscience · 2022Article
- Spiking burstiness and working memory in the human medial temporal lobe.Cerebral cortex communications · 2022Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Concept neurons in the medial temporal lobe respond to semantic features of presented stimuli. Analyzing 61 concept neurons recorded from twelve patients who underwent surgery to treat epilepsy, we show that firing patterns of concept neurons encode relations between concepts during a picture comparison task. Thirty-three of these responded to non-preferred stimuli with a delayed but well-defined onset whenever the task required a comparison to a response-eliciting concept, but not otherwise. Supporting recent theories of working memory, concept neurons increased firing whenever attention was directed towards this concept and could be reactivated after complete activity silence. Population cross-correlations of pairs of concept neurons exhibited order-dependent asymmetric peaks specifically when their response-eliciting concepts were to be compared. Our data are consistent with synaptic mechanisms that support reinstatement of concepts and their relations after activity silence, flexibly induced through task-specific sequential activation. This way arbitrary contents of experience could become interconnected in both working and long-term memory.
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