Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, United States; Department of Neurology, Dell Medical School, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, Texas, United States; Seton Brain and Spine Institute, Austin, Texas, United States
Jonathan Miller
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, United States
Department of Neurosurgery, David Geffen School of Medicine, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States; Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, United States; Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel; Department of Neurosurgery, Tel-Aviv Medical Center, Tel-Aviv, Israel
We previously demonstrated that the phase of oscillations modulates neural activity representing categorical information using human intracranial recordings and high-frequency activity from local field potentials (Watrous et al., 2015b). We extend these findings here using human single-neuron recordings during a virtual navigation task. We identify neurons in the medial temporal lobe with firing-rate modulations for specific navigational goals, as well as for navigational planning and goal arrival. Going beyond this work, using a novel oscillation detection algorithm, we identify phase-locked neural firing that encodes information about a person’s prospective navigational goal in the absence of firing rate changes. These results provide evidence for navigational planning and contextual accounts of human MTL function at the single-neuron level. More generally, our findings identify phase-coded neuronal firing as a component of the human neural code.
