Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway.
Elife. 2019 Aug 6;8:e45333. doi: 10.7554/eLife.45333.
Remembering event sequences is central to episodic memory and presumably supported by the hippocampal-entorhinal region. We previously demonstrated that the hippocampus maps spatial and temporal distances between events encountered along a route through a virtual city (Deuker et al., 2016), but the content of entorhinal mnemonic representations remains unclear. Here, we demonstrate that multi-voxel representations in the anterior-lateral entorhinal cortex (alEC) - the human homologue of the rodent lateral entorhinal cortex - specifically reflect the temporal event structure after learning. Holistic representations of the sequence structure related to memory recall and the timeline of events could be reconstructed from entorhinal multi-voxel patterns. Our findings demonstrate representations of temporal structure in the alEC; dovetailing with temporal information carried by population signals in the lateral entorhinal cortex of navigating rodents and alEC activations during temporal memory retrieval. Our results provide novel evidence for the role of the alEC in representing time for episodic memory.
记住事件序列是情景记忆的核心，可能由海马体-内嗅皮层区域支持。我们之前的研究表明，海马体可以在虚拟城市的路线中对遇到的事件的空间和时间距离进行映射（Deuker 等人，2016 年），但内嗅记忆表现的内容仍不清楚。在这里，我们证明了前外侧内嗅皮层（alEC）中的多体素表示 - 啮齿动物外侧内嗅皮层的人类同源物 - 专门反映了学习后的时间事件结构。与记忆回忆和事件时间线相关的序列结构的整体表示可以从内嗅多体素模式中重建。我们的发现证明了 alEC 中时间结构的表示；与导航啮齿动物外侧内嗅皮层中的群体信号携带的时间信息以及时间记忆检索期间 alEC 的激活相吻合。我们的研究结果为 alEC 在情景记忆中表示时间的作用提供了新的证据。
