Neural Activity in Human Hippocampal Formation Reveals the Spatial Context of Retrieved Memories
By Jonathan F. Miller, M. Neufang, Alec Solway, A. Brandt, M. Trippel, Irina Mader, S. Hefft, M. Merkow, Sean M. Polyn, Joshua Jacobs and 2 more. Science, 2013
342 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Remembrance of Places Past The hippocampus has two major roles in cognition. Place-responsive neurons form a context-sensitive cognitive map, firing more strongly when an animal traverses specific regions of its environment. Both humans and animals thus need the hippocampus to learn their way around novel environments. Similarly, the hippocampus is critical for our ability to remember a specific event in space and time. It has thus been suggested that the spatial and memory functions of the hippocampus reflect a common architecture. Recording from neurosurgical patients playing a virtual reality memory game, Miller et al. (p. 1111) found that the recall of events was indeed associated with reinstatement of the place-firing of neurons activated as the subjects navigated through the environment. Place cells in the human brain that fired at an object’s location are reactivated during spontaneous recall. In many species, spatial navigation is supported by a network of place cells that exhibit increased firing whenever an animal is in a certain region of an environment. Does this neural representation of location form part of the spatiotemporal context into which episodic memories are encoded? We recorded medial temporal lobe neuronal activity as epilepsy patients performed a hybrid spatial and episodic memory task. We identified place-responsive cells active during virtual navigation and then asked whether the same cells activated during the subsequent recall of navigation-related memories without actual navigation. Place-responsive cell activity was reinstated during episodic memory retrieval. Neuronal firing during the retrieval of each memory was similar to the activity that represented the locations in the environment where the memory was initially encoded.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3436087e6a745101b26ec30a7309d5d6b543b6c3
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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience
In Cognitive Neuroscience
Citations in the corpus
- Using Grid Cells for Navigation (2015, background): “It has been demonstrated that place cells in humans are reactivated during the retrieval of an episodic memory associated with that location (Miller et al., 2013), but whether similar reactivation occurs during route planning or in grid cells has yet to be determined.”
- Episodic Memory and Beyond: The Hippocampus and Neocortex in Transformation (2016, neutral): “There is evidence that memory for events is facilitated by familiar spatial information (e.g., Robin & Moscovitch 2014), and that regions sensitive to memory for events interact with regions sensitive to spatial memory in the HPC even at the single-cell level (Miller et al. 2013).”
- Neural bases of the bodily self as revealed by electrical brain stimulation: A systematic review (2023, background): “…location and spatial memory, as it contains place cells coding the specific location of an animal (Barry & Burgess, 2014; Burgess & O'Keefe, 2003; O'Keefe & Conway, 1978; Poucet et al., 2003; Wiener et al., 2002) or a human (Ekstrom et al., 2003; Miller et al., 2013) within a real or virtual space.”
- Rhythms of human attention and memory: An embedded process perspective (2022, background): “These executive processes may act on activated semantic representations in the NC (Binder and Desai, 2011), and information on the current time and space in MTL networks (Miller et al., 2013).”