Nature Neuroscience
3, 946 - 953 (2000)
doi:10.1038/78868
Category-specific visual responses of single neurons in the human medial
temporal lobeGabriel Kreiman1, Christof Koch1
& Itzhak Fried21
Computation and Neural Systems Program, California
Institute of Technology, 139-74, Pasadena,
California 91125, USA
2
Division of Neurosurgery and Department of Psychiatry
and Biobehavioral Sciences, Box 957039, UCLA School of Medicine,
740 Westwood Plaza, Los Angeles, California
90095-7039, USA
Correspondence should be addressed to Itzhak Fried ifried@mednet.ucla.eduThe hippocampus, amygdala and entorhinal cortex receive convergent input
from temporal neocortical regions specialized for processing complex visual
stimuli and are important in the representation and recognition of visual
images. Recording from 427 single neurons in the human hippocampus, entorhinal
cortex and amygdala, we found a remarkable degree of category-specific firing
of individual neurons on a trial-by-trial basis. Of the recorded neurons,
14% responded selectively to visual stimuli from different categories, including
faces, natural scenes and houses, famous people and animals. Based on the
firing rate of individual neurons, stimulus category could be predicted with
a mean probability of error of 0.24. In the hippocampus, the proportion of
neurons responding to spatial layouts was greater than to other categories.
Our data provide direct support for the role of human medial temporal regions
in the representation of different categories of visual stimuli.
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