Forward Processing of Object–Location Association from the Ventral Stream to Medial Temporal Lobe in Nonhuman Primates

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 1260-1271 ◽  
Author(s):  
He Chen ◽  
Yuji Naya

Abstract While the hippocampus (HPC) is a prime candidate combining object identity and location due to its strong connections to the ventral and dorsal pathways via surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) areas, recent physiological studies have reported spatial information in the ventral pathway and its downstream target in MTL. However, it remains unknown whether the object–location association proceeds along the ventral MTL pathway before HPC. To address this question, we recorded neuronal activity from MTL and area anterior inferotemporal cortex (TE) of two macaques gazing at an object to retain its identity and location in each trial. The results showed significant effects of object–location association at a single-unit level in TE, perirhinal cortex (PRC), and HPC, but not in the parahippocampal cortex. Notably, a clear area difference emerged in the association form: 1) representations of object identity were added to those of subjects’ viewing location in TE; 2) PRC signaled both the additive form and the conjunction of the two inputs; and 3) HPC signaled only the conjunction signal. These results suggest that the object and location signals are combined stepwise at TE and PRC each time primates view an object, and PRC may provide HPC with the conjunctional signal, which might be used for encoding episodic memory.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shao-Fang Wang ◽  
Valerie A. Carr ◽  
Serra E. Favila ◽  
Jeremy N. Bailenson ◽  
Thackery I. Brown ◽  
...  

AbstractThe hippocampus (HC) and surrounding medial temporal lobe (MTL) cortical regions play a critical role in spatial navigation and episodic memory. However, it remains unclear how the interaction between the HC’s conjunctive coding and mnemonic differentiation contributes to neural representations of spatial environments. Multivariate functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analyses enable examination of how human HC and MTL cortical regions encode multidimensional spatial information to support memory-guided navigation. We combined high-resolution fMRI with a virtual navigation paradigm in which participants relied on memory of the environment to navigate to goal locations in two different virtual rooms. Within each room, participants were cued to navigate to four learned locations, each associated with one of two reward values. Pattern similarity analysis revealed that when participants successfully arrived at goal locations, activity patterns in HC and parahippocampal cortex (PHC) represented room-goal location conjunctions and activity patterns in HC subfields represented room-reward-location conjunctions. These results add to an emerging literature revealing hippocampal conjunctive representations during goal-directed behavior.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan L. Benear ◽  
Elizabeth A. Horwath ◽  
Emily Cowan ◽  
M. Catalina Camacho ◽  
Chi Ngo ◽  
...  

The medial temporal lobe (MTL) undergoes critical developmental change throughout childhood, which aligns with developmental changes in episodic memory. We used representational similarity analysis to compare neural pattern similarity for children and adults in hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex during naturalistic viewing of clips from the same movie or different movies. Some movies were more familiar to participants than others. Neural pattern similarity was generally lower for clips from the same movie, indicating that related content taxes pattern separation-like processes. However, children showed this effect only for movies with which they were familiar, whereas adults showed the effect consistently. These data suggest that children need more exposures to stimuli in order to show mature pattern separation processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
He Chen ◽  
Yuji Naya

Recent work has shown that the medial temporal lobe (MTL), including the hippocampus (HPC) and its surrounding limbic cortices, plays a role in scene perception in addition to episodic memory. The two basic factors of scene perception are the object (“what”) and location (“where”). In this review, we first summarize the anatomical knowledge related to visual inputs to the MTL and physiological studies examining object-related information processed along the ventral pathway briefly. Thereafter, we discuss the space-related information, the processing of which was unclear, presumably because of its multiple aspects and a lack of appropriate task paradigm in contrast to object-related information. Based on recent electrophysiological studies using non-human primates and the existing literature, we proposed the “reunification theory,” which explains brain mechanisms which construct object-location signals at each gaze. In this reunification theory, the ventral pathway signals a large-scale background image of the retina at each gaze position. This view-center background signal reflects the first person’s perspective and specifies the allocentric location in the environment by similarity matching between images. The spatially invariant object signal and view-center background signal, both of which are derived from the same retinal image, are integrated again (i.e., reunification) along the ventral pathway-MTL stream, particularly in the perirhinal cortex. The conjunctive signal, which represents a particular object at a particular location, may play a role in scene perception in the HPC as a key constituent element of an entire scene.


2011 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 670-682 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicole M. Dudukovic ◽  
Alison R. Preston ◽  
Jermaine J. Archie ◽  
Gary H. Glover ◽  
Anthony D. Wagner

A primary function of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) is to signal prior encounter with behaviorally relevant stimuli. MTL match enhancement—increased activation when viewing previously encountered stimuli—has been observed for goal-relevant stimuli in nonhuman primates during delayed-match-to-sample tasks and in humans during more complex relational memory tasks. Match enhancement may alternatively reflect (a) an attentional response to familiar relative to novel stimuli or (b) the retrieval of contextual details surrounding the past encounter with familiar stimuli. To gain leverage on the functional significance of match enhancement in the hippocampus, high-resolution fMRI of human MTL was conducted while participants attended, ignored, or passively viewed face and scene stimuli in the context of a modified delayed-match-to-sample task. On each “attended” trial, two goal-relevant stimuli were encountered before a probe that either matched or mismatched one of the attended stimuli, enabling examination of the consequences of encountering one of the goal-relevant stimuli as a match probe on later memory for the other (nonprobed) goal-relevant stimulus. fMRI revealed that the hippocampus was insensitive to the attentional manipulation, whereas parahippocampal cortex was modulated by scene-directed attention, and perirhinal cortex showed more subtle and general effects of attention. By contrast, all hippocampal subfields demonstrated match enhancement to the probe, and a postscan test revealed more accurate recognition memory for the nonprobed goal-relevant stimulus on match relative to mismatch trials. These data suggest that match enhancement in human hippocampus reflects retrieval of other goal-relevant contextual details surrounding a stimulus's prior encounter.


1997 ◽  
Vol 352 (1360) ◽  
pp. 1469-1474 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brenda Milner ◽  
Ingrid Johnsrude ◽  
Joelle Crane

An important aspect of normal human memory, and one humans share with many other species, is the ability to remember the location of objects in their environment. There is by now strong evidence from the study of epileptic patients undergoing brain surgery that right temporal–lobe lesions that encroach extensively upon the hippocampal and parahippocampal gyrus impair the delayed, but not the immediate, recall of the location of objects within a random array. These findings have now been extended to a multiple–trial, spatial–array learning task; by including not only patients tested after unilateral anterior temporal lobectomy but also those with a selective left or right amygdalohippocampectomy, it has been shown that the deficits associated with right hippocampal lesions are not dependent upon conjoint damage to the lateral temporal neocortex. Furthermore, the fact that on the learning task no group differences were seen on Trial 1, at zero delay, strengthened the view that the impairment was in the maintenance and subsequent retrieval of information rather than in its initial encoding. These results left unresolved the question of whether the deficit was in the mediation of object–place associations or whether it could be reduced to a more general impairment in memory for location as such. Also left unanswered was the neuroanatomical question as to the relative contributions of the hippocampus and the parahippocampal gyrus to the performance of the experimental tasks. These questions were addressed in two blood–flow activation studies that made use of positron emission tomography (PET) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and incorporated computerized versions of object–location and simple–location memory tasks. Taken together, the results point to a special contribution from the anterior part of the right parahippocampal gyrus, probably corresponding to the entorhinal cortex, to the retrieval of object–place associations, a result consonant with neurophysiological findings in non–human primates.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Seoane ◽  
Cristián Modroño ◽  
José Luis González Mora ◽  
Niels Janssen

Abstract The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is a set of interconnected brain regions that have been shown to play a central role in behavior as well as in neurological disease. Recent studies using resting-state functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (rsfMRI) have attempted to understand the MTL in terms of its functional connectivity with the rest of the brain. However, the exact characterization of the whole-brain networks that co-activate with the MTL as well as how the various sub-regions of the MTL are associated with these networks remains poorly understood. Here we attempted to advance these issues by exploiting the high spatial-resolution 7T rsfMRI dataset from the Human Connectome Project with a data-driven analysis approach that relied on Independent Component Analysis (ICA) restricted to the MTL. We found that four different well-known resting-state networks co-activated with a unique configuration of MTL subcomponents. Specifically, we found that different sections of the parahippocampal cortex were involved in the default mode, visual and dorsal attention networks, sections of the hippocampus in the somatomotor and default mode networks, and the lateral entorhinal cortex in the dorsal attention network. We replicated this set of results in a validation sample. These results provide new insight into how the MTL and its subcomponents contribute to known resting-state networks. The participation of the MTL in an expanded range of resting-state networks requires a rethink of its presumed role in behavior and disease.


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