Single neurons in the human medial temporal lobe flexibly shift representations across spatial and memory tasks

Area of Science:

• Neuroscience
• Cognitive Science

Background:

• Individual neurons exhibit diverse representations, but how these change across tasks is unclear.
• The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is crucial for spatial navigation and memory, yet the link between these functions in neural representations remains elusive.

Approach:

• Analyzed single-neuron activity from human participants performing paired visual working memory and spatial navigation tasks.
• Compared neuronal representations within and across tasks using spike-sorted data from five patients.

Key Points:

• Confirmed task-specific neuronal activity, including concept-related cells in working memory and location/serial-position cells in navigation.
• Found that many neurons maintained similar representations across tasks.
• Identified a significant number of neurons that altered their representations, shifting from stimulus-specific to serial-position coding.

Conclusions:

• Single neurons in the human MTL demonstrate flexible encoding capabilities.
• Neuronal representations can adapt and change feature coding depending on the task context.