Cognitive adventures of single neurons

The human medial temporal lobe contains neurons that respond selectively to the semantic contents
of a presented stimulus. These "concept cells" may respond to very different pictures of a given person
and even to their written and spoken name. Their response latency is far longer than necessary for
object recognition, they follow subjective, conscious perception, and they are found in brain regions
that are crucial for declarative memory formation. It has thus been hypothesized that they may
represent the semantic "building blocks" of episodic memories.
In this talk I will present data from single unit recordings in the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex,
parahippocampal cortex, and amygdala during paradigms involving object recognition as well as
encoding and consolidation of episodic memories in order to characterize the role of concept cells in
these cognitive functions.