Rutishauser, Ueli
<p>Jan 19, 2018 11:25 AM (see his seminar today at FriSem)</p>
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trained with Christof Koch at Caltech.</p>
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* FriSem today </p>
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The rapid formation of new memories and the recall of old memories to inform decisions is essential for human cognition, but the underlying neuronal mechanisms remain poorly understood at the circuit level.</p>
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We are developing a circuit-level understanding of human memory by utilizing a combination of invasive in-vivo recordings in humans during neurosurgical procedures, behavior, focal electrical stimulation, non-invasive neuroimaging, and computational modeling.</p>
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In this talk, I will describe a putative circuit for human recognition memory composed of cells in the medial <b>temporal lobe (MTL), the substantia nigra (SNR), and the posterior parietal cortex (PPC)</b>. In the MTL, this putative circuit is composed of two functional cell types, visually-and memory selective neurons, whose interaction is mediated by theta oscillations.</p>
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Visually-selective neurons are tuned to high-level concepts, are sensitive to attention, and their activity forms attractors through persistent activity over several seconds while stimuli are held in working memory. Memory-selective neurons, on the other hand, signal whether a stimulus is novel or familiar, a property that changes after a single learning trial. In the SNR, dopaminergic memory-selective cells respond in a manner predicted by Lisman’s loop model of memory formation. Lastly, in the PPC, memory-based choice cells represent a putative readout of memories to support memory-based recognition and confidence decisions. Together, these results begin to provide a circuit-level understanding of human memory at a level of detail that is needed for the development of new treatments for memory disorders.
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