Wang Shuo, Chandravadia Nand, Mamelak Adam N, Rutishauser Ueli
Department of Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, and Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, West Virginia University;
Departments of Neurosurgery and Neurology, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.
J Vis Exp. 2019 Jun 17(148). doi: 10.3791/59117.
Intracranial recordings from patients with intractable epilepsy provide a unique opportunity to study the activity of individual human neurons during active behavior. An important tool for quantifying behavior is eye tracking, which is an indispensable tool for studying visual attention. However, eye tracking is challenging to use concurrently with invasive electrophysiology and this approach has consequently been little used. Here, we present a proven experimental protocol to conduct single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking in humans. We describe how the systems are connected and the optimal settings to record neurons and eye movements. To illustrate the utility of this method, we summarize results that were made possible by this setup. This data shows how using eye tracking in a memory-guided visual search task allowed us to describe a new class of neurons called target neurons, whose response was reflective of top-down attention to the current search target. Lastly, we discuss the significance and solutions to potential problems of this setup. Together, our protocol and results suggest that single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking in humans are an effective method to study human brain function. It provides a key missing link between animal neurophysiology and human cognitive neuroscience.
对顽固性癫痫患者进行颅内记录，为研究个体人类神经元在主动行为期间的活动提供了独特机会。量化行为的一项重要工具是眼动追踪，它是研究视觉注意力不可或缺的工具。然而，眼动追踪与侵入性电生理学同时使用具有挑战性，因此这种方法很少被采用。在此，我们展示了一种经过验证的实验方案，用于在人类中进行单神经元记录并同时进行眼动追踪。我们描述了系统如何连接以及记录神经元和眼动的最佳设置。为说明该方法的实用性，我们总结了通过此设置得以实现的结果。这些数据表明，在记忆引导的视觉搜索任务中使用眼动追踪，使我们能够描述一类名为目标神经元的新神经元，其反应反映了对当前搜索目标的自上而下的注意力。最后，我们讨论了此设置的潜在问题的重要性及解决方案。总之，我们的方案和结果表明，在人类中进行单神经元记录并同时进行眼动追踪是研究人类脑功能的有效方法。它提供了动物神经生理学与人类认知神经科学之间关键的缺失环节。
