C3N

🧠 Excited to present my research at #NWG2025, supervised by @stefanieliebe.bsky.social!
"Representation of Sequence Memory in the Human Medial Temporal Lobe"
📍 Hall 8 (S20)
⏰ 11:30 AM Today
@c3neuro.bsky.social @neurowissg.bsky.social @brainloops.bsky.social #Neuroscience #LOOPSatNWG

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We thank @dfg.de @ml4science.bsky.social @brainloops.bsky.social @tuebingen-ai.bsky.social for the support!

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In summary: Phase of firing reflects temporal order of items through a revised mechanism linking oscillatory phase, stimulus timing, and memory - and not through direct, order-preserving encoding

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Analysis of the RNN nd comparison with human recordings suggests a more general idea:
Phase of firing is shaped by an interaction of the dynamics of stimulus presentation and oscillation frequency.

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We asked: How would a recurrent neural network solve the task?
In a similar way: it also showed phase-structured firing that didn’t match item order, just like the human brain data.

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Despite observing strong theta oscillations and phase-specific firing for items, we found no evidence that neurons fire in the same sequence as items were presented. (A direct contradiction to a classical prior theory)

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With @stefanieliebe.bsky.social, J. Niediek, @matthijspals.bsky.social , @humansingleneuron.bsky.social & @mackelab.bsky.social.
We recorded from 1,420 neurons and 921 LFP channels in human MTL in epilepsy patients during sequential working memory.

Phase of firing does not reflect temporal order in sequence memory of humans and recurrent neural networks - Nature Neuroscience The temporal order of events in working memory is thought to be reflected by ordered neuronal firing at different phases. Here the authors show that this is not the case and that phase order is linked...

Science Alert 🚨: Our paper is now out in @natureneuro.bsky.social - We show that the firing phase of neurons in human MTL doesn’t reflect the order of events, challenging a long-standing theory of human memory.
nature.com/articles/s41593-025-01893-7