Every day, people are asked to find something – a familiar face in a crowd, a child in the park, a particular house on a street. While researchers have long-since known that the ability to effectively search and detect goal-relevant targets is controlled by top-down signals from the brain’s frontal area, a researcher from West Virginia University has found evidence that the human medial temporal lobe – or MTL – also plays an essential role in this process.
Shuo Wang, assistant professor of chemical and biomedical engineering, has found that the MTL contains a strikingly functional type of cell never described before in humans: target cells.
Wang and his collaborators – Ueli Rutishauser and Adam Mamelak from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Ralph Adolphs from California Institute of Technology – took the very rare opportunity to record single neurons from epilepsy patients, who were undergoing seizure monitoring at Cedars-Sinai. They performed concurrent recordings of eye movements and single neurons in the MTL and medial frontal cortex – or MFC – in human neurosurgical patients performing a memory-guided visual search task.
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AANS Neurosurgeon is the official socioeconomic publication of the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) and features information and analysis for contemporary neurosurgical practice. Published monthly online, AANS Neurosurgeon focuses on issues related to neurosurgery legislation, the workforce and practice management.
