Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-10-2020

Comments

This article is the author’s final published version in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Volume 117, Issue 45, November 2020, Pages 28463-28474

The published version is available at https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2013250117. Copyright © Umbach et al.

Abstract

The organization of temporal information is critical for the encoding and retrieval of episodic memories. In the rodent hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, evidence accumulated over the last decade suggests that populations of "time cells" in the hippocampus encode temporal information. We identify time cells in humans using intracranial microelectrode recordings obtained from 27 human epilepsy patients who performed an episodic memory task. We show that time cell activity predicts the temporal organization of retrieved memory items. We also uncover evidence of ramping cell activity in humans, which represents a complementary type of temporal information. These findings establish a cellular mechanism for the representation of temporal information in the human brain needed to form episodic memories.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

PubMed ID

33109718

Language

English

Included in

Neurology Commons

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