Topic: single-unit activity

Brains can gracefully weed out irrelevant stimuli to guide behavior. This feat is believed to rely on a progressive selection of task-relevant stimuli across the cortical hierarchy, but the specific across-area interactions enabling stimulus selection are still unclear. Here, we propose that population gating, occurring within A1 but controlled by top-down inputs from mPFC, can support across-area stimulus selection. Examining single-unit activity recorded while rats performed an auditory context-dependent task, we found that A1 encoded relevant and irrelevant stimuli along a common dimension

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