Topic: epilepsy patients

A prominent theory proposes that maintaining sequential information in memory is reflected in ordered firing of neurons at different phases of theta oscillations (1). One study has recently challenged this view using single-unit and LFP recordings from epilepsy patients in the human medial temporal lobe (MTL, 2). In addition to predicting a specific temporal relationship between spiking and theta oscillations related to temporal order, the theory also assumes that 1. gamma-frequency activity encodes stimulus-relevant information that is maintained within memory and temporally aligned to spikin

Humans can infer never-experienced global relational structures (e.g., "A>D”) by observing and integrating multiple local relations (e.g., "A>B", "B>C", “C>D”). This capability for “transitive inference” (TI) depends on the medial temporal lobe (MTL). But the mechanisms by which the MTL performs TI remain poorly understood. Previous work suggested that “concept cells” (CCs), which are neurons that selectively respond to preferred concepts (e.g. “A”), might contribute to relational learning and potentially TI by widening their tuning to new concepts that co-occurred with initially r