scholarly journals Investigating the Interaction between Spatial Perception and Working Memory in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe

2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2823-2835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andy C. H. Lee ◽  
Sarah R. Rudebeck
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Scene Perception ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Spatial Processing ◽  
Processing Conditions ◽  
Parahippocampal Cortex

There has been considerable debate surrounding the functions of the medial temporal lobe (MTL). Although this region has been traditionally thought to subserve long-term declarative memory only, recent evidence suggests a role in short-term working memory and even higher order perception. To investigate this issue, functional neuroimaging was used to investigate the involvement of the MTL in spatial scene perception and working memory. Healthy participants were scanned during a working memory task incorporating two factors of working memory (high vs. low demand) and spatial processing (complex vs. simple). It was found that an increase in spatial processing demand produced significantly greater activity in the posterior hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex irrespective of whether working memory demand was high or low. In contrast, there was no region within the MTL that increased significantly in activity during both the complex and the simple spatial processing conditions when working memory demand was increased. There was, however, a significant interaction effect between spatial processing and working memory in the right posterior hippocampus and parahippocampal cortex bilaterally: An increase in working memory demand produced a significant increase in activity in these areas during the complex, but not simple, spatial processing conditions. These findings suggest that although there may be a role for the MTL in both stimulus processing and working memory, increasing the latter does not necessarily increase posterior MTL involvement. We suggest that these structures may play a critical role in processing complex spatial representations, which, in turn, may form the basis of short- and long-term mnemonic processes.

scholarly journals The Medial Temporal Lobe Is Critical for Spatial Relational Perception

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 (9) ◽  
pp. 1780-1795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas A. Ruiz ◽  
Michael R. Meager ◽  
Sachin Agarwal ◽  
Mariam Aly
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Cognitive Domains ◽  
Attention Tasks ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Attention And Perception

The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is traditionally considered to be a system that is specialized for long-term memory. Recent work has challenged this notion by demonstrating that this region can contribute to many domains of cognition beyond long-term memory, including perception and attention. One potential reason why the MTL (and hippocampus specifically) contributes broadly to cognition is that it contains relational representations—representations of multidimensional features of experience and their unique relationship to one another—that are useful in many different cognitive domains. Here, we explore the hypothesis that the hippocampus/MTL plays a critical role in attention and perception via relational representations. We compared human participants with MTL damage to healthy age- and education-matched individuals on attention tasks that varied in relational processing demands. On each trial, participants viewed two images (rooms with paintings). On “similar room” trials, they judged whether the rooms had the same spatial layout from a different perspective. On “similar art” trials, they judged whether the paintings could have been painted by the same artist. On “identical” trials, participants simply had to detect identical paintings or rooms. MTL lesion patients were significantly and selectively impaired on the similar room task. This work provides further evidence that the hippocampus/MTL plays a ubiquitous role in cognition by virtue of its relational and spatial representations and highlights its important contributions to rapid perceptual processes that benefit from attention.

scholarly journals Representations of local spatial information in the human medial temporal lobe during memory-guided navigation

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shao-Fang Wang ◽  
Valerie A. Carr ◽  
Serra E. Favila ◽  
Jeremy N. Bailenson ◽  
Thackery I. Brown ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Spatial Information ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Neural Representations ◽  
Parahippocampal Cortex ◽  
Pattern Similarity ◽  
Cortical Regions ◽  
Goal Directed Behavior

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.

Distinct neural correlates of associative working memory and long-term memory encoding in the medial temporal lobe

NeuroImage ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 989-997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heiko C. Bergmann ◽  
Mark Rijpkema ◽  
Guillén Fernández ◽  
Roy P.C. Kessels
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Neural Correlates ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Memory Encoding ◽  
Term Memory

scholarly journals Medial temporal lobe and topographical memory

2017 ◽  
Vol 114 (32) ◽  
pp. 8626-8630 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhisen J. Urgolites ◽  
Ramona O. Hopkins ◽  
Larry R. Squire
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Correct Choice ◽  
Spatial Processing ◽  
Perceptual Task ◽  
Spatial Tasks ◽  
Different Shapes ◽  
Materials Used ◽  
The Moment

There has been interest in the idea that medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures might be especially important for spatial processing and spatial memory. We tested the proposal that the MTL has a specific role in topographical memory as assessed in tasks of scene memory where the viewpoint shifts from study to test. Building on materials used previously for such studies, we administered three different tasks in a total of nine conditions. Participants studied a scene depicting four hills of different shapes and sizes and made a choice among four test images. In the Rotation task, the correct choice depicted the study scene from a shifted perspective. MTL patients succeeded when the study and test images were presented together but failed the moment the study scene was removed (even at a 0-s delay). In the No-Rotation task, the correct choice was a duplicate of the study scene. Patients were impaired to the same extent in the No-Rotation and Rotation tasks after matching for difficulty. Thus, an inability to accommodate changes in viewpoint does not account for patient impairment. In the Nonspatial–Perceptual task, the correct choice depicted the same overall coloring as the study scene. Patients were intact at a 2-s delay but failed at longer, distraction-filled delays. The different results for the spatial and nonspatial tasks are discussed in terms of differences in demand on working memory. We suggest that the difficulty of the spatial tasks rests on the neocortex and on the limitations of working memory, not on the MTL.

scholarly journals Medial temporal lobe activity at recognition increases with the duration of mnemonic delay during an object working memory task

2007 ◽  
Vol 28 (11) ◽  
pp. 1235-1250 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Picchioni ◽  
Pall Matthiasson ◽  
Matthew Broome ◽  
Vincent Giampietro ◽  
Mick Brammer ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory Task

scholarly journals The medial temporal lobe is critical for spatial relational perception

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas A. Ruiz ◽  
Michael R. Meager ◽  
Sachin Agarwal ◽  
Mariam Aly
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Long Term Memory ◽  
Term Memory ◽  
Cognitive Domains ◽  
Attention Tasks ◽  
Human Participants ◽  
Attention And Perception

AbstractThe medial temporal lobe (MTL) is traditionally considered to be a system that is specialized for long-term memory. Recent work has challenged this notion by demonstrating that this region can contribute to many domains of cognition beyond long-term memory, including perception and attention. One potential reason why the MTL (and hippocampus specifically) contributes broadly to cognition is that it contains relational representations — representations of multidimensional features of experience and their unique relationship to one another — that are useful in many different cognitive domains. Here, we explore the hypothesis that the hippocampus/MTL plays a critical role in attention and perception via relational representations. We compared human participants with MTL damage to healthy age- and education-matched individuals on attention tasks that varied in relational processing demands. On each trial, participants viewed two images (rooms with paintings). On ‘similar room’ trials, they judged whether the rooms had the same spatial layout from a different perspective. On ‘similar art’ trials, they judged whether the paintings could have been painted by the same artist. On ‘identical’ trials, participants simply had to detect identical paintings or rooms. Patients were significantly and selectively impaired on the similar room task. This work provides further evidence that the hippocampus/MTL plays a ubiquitous role in cognition by virtue of its relational and spatial representations, and highlights its important contributions to rapid perceptual processes that benefit from attention.

Incidental reinstatement of faces and scenes in medial temporal lobe subregions during word recognition

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidrun Schultz ◽  
Tobias Sommer ◽  
Jan Peters
Keyword(s):  
Word Recognition ◽  
Recognition Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Explicit Instruction ◽  
Functional Model ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Parahippocampal Cortex ◽  
Human Volunteers ◽  
Open Question

AbstractDuring associative retrieval, the brain reinstates neural representations that were present during encoding. The human medial temporal lobe (MTL) with its subregions hippocampus (HC), perirhinal cortex (PRC), and parahippocampal cortex (PHC) plays a central role in neural reinstatement. Previous studies have given compelling evidence for reinstatement in the MTL during explicitly instructed associative retrieval. High-confident recognition may be similarly accompanied by recollection of associated information from the encoding context. It is unclear, however, whether high-confident recognition memory elicits reinstatement in the MTL even in the absence of an explicit instruction to retrieve associated information. Here, we addressed this open question using high-resolution fMRI. Twenty-eight male and female human volunteers engaged in a recognition memory task for words that they had previously encoded together with faces and scenes. Using complementary uni- and multivariate approaches, we show that MTL subregions including the PRC, PHC, and HC differentially reinstate category-specific representations during high-confident word recognition, even though no explicit instruction to retrieve the associated category was given. This constitutes novel evidence that high-confident recognition memory is accompanied by incidental reinstatement of associated category information in MTL subregions, and supports a functional model of the MTL that emphasises content-sensitive representations during both encoding and retrieval.

scholarly journals Dataset of human medial temporal lobe neurons, scalp and intracranial EEG during a verbal working memory task

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ece Boran ◽  
Tommaso Fedele ◽  
Adrian Steiner ◽  
Peter Hilfiker ◽  
Lennart Stieglitz ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Verbal Working Memory ◽  
Intracranial Eeg

scholarly journals Semantics of the Visual Environment Encoded in Parahippocampal Cortex

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 361-378 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael F. Bonner ◽  
Amy Rose Price ◽  
Jonathan E. Peelle ◽  
Murray Grossman
Keyword(s):  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Primary Progressive Aphasia ◽  
Semantic Knowledge ◽  
Individual Variability ◽  
Visual Environment ◽  
Parahippocampal Cortex ◽  
Visual Concepts ◽  
High Level

Semantic representations capture the statistics of experience and store this information in memory. A fundamental component of this memory system is knowledge of the visual environment, including knowledge of objects and their associations. Visual semantic information underlies a range of behaviors, from perceptual categorization to cognitive processes such as language and reasoning. Here we examine the neuroanatomic system that encodes visual semantics. Across three experiments, we found converging evidence indicating that knowledge of verbally mediated visual concepts relies on information encoded in a region of the ventral-medial temporal lobe centered on parahippocampal cortex. In an fMRI study, this region was strongly engaged by the processing of concepts relying on visual knowledge but not by concepts relying on other sensory modalities. In a study of patients with the semantic variant of primary progressive aphasia (semantic dementia), atrophy that encompassed this region was associated with a specific impairment in verbally mediated visual semantic knowledge. Finally, in a structural study of healthy adults from the fMRI experiment, gray matter density in this region related to individual variability in the processing of visual concepts. The anatomic location of these findings aligns with recent work linking the ventral-medial temporal lobe with high-level visual representation, contextual associations, and reasoning through imagination. Together, this work suggests a critical role for parahippocampal cortex in linking the visual environment with knowledge systems in the human brain.

scholarly journals Neuronal firing in the medial temporal lobe reflects human working memory workload, performance and capacity

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ece Boran ◽  
Peter Hilfiker ◽  
Lennart Stieglitz ◽  
Thomas Grunwald ◽  
Johannes Sarnthein ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Temporal Lobe ◽  
Visual Information ◽  
Medial Temporal Lobe ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Individual Performance ◽  
Neuronal Firing ◽  
Maintenance Period ◽  
Multiple Objects ◽  
Short Period

2AbstractThe involvement of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) in working memory is controversially discussed. Critically, it is unclear whether and how the MTL supports performance of working memory. We recorded single neuron firing in 13 epilepsy patients while they performed a visual working memory task. The number of colored squares in the stimulus set determined the workload of the trial. We used the subjects’ memory capacity (Cowan’s K) to split them into a low and high capacity group. We found MTL neurons that showed persistent firing during the maintenance period. Firing was higher in the hippocampus for trials with correct compared to incorrect performance. Population firing predicted workload particularly during the maintenance period. Prediction accuracy of single trial activity was strongest for neurons in the entorhinal cortex of low capacity subjects. We provide evidence that low capacity subjects recruit their MTL to cope with an overload of working memory task demands.1SignificanceHumans are highly limited in processing multiple objects over a short period of time. The capacity to retain multiple objects in working memory is typically associated with frontal and parietal lobe functioning, even though medial temporal lobe (MTL) neural architecture seems capable to process such information. However, there are conflicting findings from patient, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies. Here we show for the first time that correct performance, workload and individual performance differences are reflected in separate mechanisms of neural activity within the MTL during maintenance of visual information in working memory. The data suggest that low capacity subjects use the MTL to process the overload of information.

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