Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience Group, SILS Center for Neuroscience, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Research Priority Area Brain and Cognition, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Hippocampus. 2021 Jul;31(7):737-755. doi: 10.1002/hipo.23304. Epub 2021 Feb 1.
The perirhinal cortex is situated on the border between sensory association cortex and the hippocampal formation. It serves an important function as a transition area between the sensory neocortex and the medial temporal lobe. While the perirhinal cortex has traditionally been associated with object coding and the "what" pathway of the temporal lobe, current evidence suggests a broader function of the perirhinal cortex in solving feature ambiguity and processing complex stimuli. Besides fulfilling functions in object coding, recent neurophysiological findings in freely moving rodents indicate that the perirhinal cortex also contributes to spatial and contextual processing beyond individual sensory modalities. Here, we address how these two opposing views on perirhinal cortex-the object-centered and spatial-contextual processing hypotheses-may be reconciled. The perirhinal cortex is consistently recruited when different features can be merged perceptually or conceptually into a single entity. Features that are unitized in these entities include object information from multiple sensory domains, reward associations, semantic features and spatial/contextual associations. We propose that the same perirhinal network circuits can be flexibly deployed for multiple cognitive functions, such that the perirhinal cortex performs similar unitization operations on different types of information, depending on behavioral demands and ranging from the object-related domain to spatial, contextual and semantic information.
梨状皮层位于感觉联合皮层和海马结构之间的边界上。它作为感觉新皮层和内侧颞叶之间的过渡区域具有重要功能。虽然梨状皮层传统上与物体编码和颞叶的“什么”通路有关，但目前的证据表明，梨状皮层在解决特征歧义以及处理复杂刺激方面具有更广泛的功能。除了在物体编码中发挥作用外，最近在自由活动的啮齿动物中的神经生理学发现表明，梨状皮层还有助于超越单个感觉模式的空间和上下文处理。在这里，我们探讨了如何调和这两种对立的梨状皮层观点——以物体为中心的和空间-上下文处理假说。当不同的特征可以在感知上或概念上合并为单个实体时，梨状皮层会被一致地招募。在这些实体中组合在一起的特征包括来自多个感觉域的物体信息、奖励关联、语义特征和空间/上下文关联。我们提出，相同的梨状皮层网络电路可以灵活地用于多种认知功能，使得梨状皮层对不同类型的信息执行类似的组合操作，具体取决于行为需求，范围从与物体相关的领域到空间、上下文和语义信息。
