Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University, New York, NY 10027, USA.
Department of Neurological Surgery, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA.
Cell. 2021 Jun 10;184(12):3242-3255.e10. doi: 10.1016/j.cell.2021.04.017. Epub 2021 May 11.
Knowing where we are, where we have been, and where we are going is critical to many behaviors, including navigation and memory. One potential neuronal mechanism underlying this ability is phase precession, in which spatially tuned neurons represent sequences of positions by activating at progressively earlier phases of local network theta oscillations. Based on studies in rodents, researchers have hypothesized that phase precession may be a general neural pattern for representing sequential events for learning and memory. By recording human single-neuron activity during spatial navigation, we show that spatially tuned neurons in the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex exhibit phase precession. Furthermore, beyond the neural representation of locations, we show evidence for phase precession related to specific goal states. Our findings thus extend theta phase precession to humans and suggest that this phenomenon has a broad functional role for the neural representation of both spatial and non-spatial information.
了解我们所处的位置、我们去过的地方以及我们要去的地方，对于许多行为至关重要，包括导航和记忆。潜在的神经元机制之一是相位进动，其中空间调谐神经元通过在局部网络θ振荡的相位逐渐提前激活来表示位置序列。基于啮齿动物的研究，研究人员假设相位进动可能是学习和记忆中表示序列事件的一般神经模式。通过在空间导航过程中记录人类单个神经元的活动，我们发现人类海马体和内嗅皮层中的空间调谐神经元表现出相位进动。此外，除了位置的神经表示之外，我们还证明了与特定目标状态相关的相位进动的证据。因此，我们的发现将θ相位进动扩展到了人类，并表明这种现象对于空间和非空间信息的神经表示具有广泛的功能作用。
