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Neste Artigo

  • Resumo
  • Resumo
  • Introdução
  • Protocolo
  • Resultados
  • Discussão
  • Divulgações
  • Agradecimentos
  • Materiais
  • Referências
  • Reimpressões e Permissões

Resumo

We describe a method to conduct single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking in humans. We demonstrate the utility of this method and illustrate how we used this approach to obtain neurons in the human medial temporal lobe that encode targets of a visual search.

Resumo

Intracranial recordings from patients with intractable epilepsy provide a unique opportunity to study the activity of individual human neurons during active behavior. An important tool for quantifying behavior is eye tracking, which is an indispensable tool for studying visual attention. However, eye tracking is challenging to use concurrently with invasive electrophysiology and this approach has consequently been little used. Here, we present a proven experimental protocol to conduct single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking in humans. We describe how the systems are connected and the optimal settings to record neurons and eye movements. To illustrate the utility of this method, we summarize results that were made possible by this setup. This data shows how using eye tracking in a memory-guided visual search task allowed us to describe a new class of neurons called target neurons, whose response was reflective of top-down attention to the current search target. Lastly, we discuss the significance and solutions to potential problems of this setup. Together, our protocol and results suggest that single-neuron recordings with simultaneous eye tracking in humans are an effective method to study human brain function. It provides a key missing link between animal neurophysiology and human cognitive neuroscience.

Introdução

Human single-neuron recordings are a unique and powerful tool to explore the function of the human brain with extraordinary spatial and temporal resolution1. Recently, single-neuron recordings have gained wide use in the field of cognitive neuroscience because they permit the direct investigation of cognitive processes central to human cognition. These recordings are made possible by the clinical need to determine the position of epileptic foci, for which depth electrodes are temporarily implanted into the brains of patients with suspected focal epilepsy. With this setup, single-neuron recordings can be obtained using microwires protruding from....

Protocolo

1. Participants

  1. Recruit neurosurgical patients with intractable epilepsy who are undergoing placement of intracranial electrodes to localize their epileptic seizures.
  2. Insert depth electrodes with embedded microwires into all clinically indicated target locations, which typically include a subset of amygdala, hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex and pre-supplementary motor area. See details for implantation in our previous protocol2.
  3. Once the patient returns to the epilepsy monitoring unit, connect the recording equipment for both macro- and micro- recordings. This includes carefully preparing a head-wrap that i....

Resultados

To illustrate the usage of the above-mentioned method, we next briefly describe a use-case that we recently published8. We recorded 228 single neurons from the human medial temporal lobe (MTL; amygdala and hippocampus) while the patients were performing a visual search task (Figure 3A, B). During this task, we investigated whether the activity of neurons differentiated between fixations on targets and distractors.

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Discussão

In this protocol, we described how to employ single-neuron recordings with concurrent eye tracking and described how we used this method to identify target neurons in the human MTL.

The setup involves three computers: one executing the task (stimulus computer), one running the eye tracker, and one running the acquisition system. To synchronize between the three systems, the parallel port is used to send TTL triggers from the stimulus computer to the electrophysiology system (

Divulgações

The authors declare no conflict of interest.

Agradecimentos

We thank all patients for their participation. This research was supported by the Rockefeller Neuroscience Institute, the Autism Science Foundation and the Dana Foundation (to S.W.), an NSF CAREER award (1554105 to U.R.), and the NIH (R01MH110831 and U01NS098961 to U.R.). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. We thank James Lee, Erika Quan, and the staff of the Cedars-Sinai Simulation Center for their help in producing the demonstration video.

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Materiais

NameCompanyCatalog NumberComments
Cedrus Response BoxCedrus (https://cedrus.com/)RB-844Button box
Dell LaptopDell (https://dell.com)Precision 7520Stimulus Computer
EyeLink Eye TrackerSR Research (https://www.sr-research.com)1000 Plus Remote with laptop host computer and LCD arm mountEye tracking
MATLABMathWorks IncR2016a (RRID: SCR_001622)Data analysis
Neuralynx Neurophysiology SystemNeuralynx (https://neuralynx.com)ATLAS 128Electrophysiology
OsortOpen sourcev4.1 (RRID: SCR_015869)Spike sorting algorithm
Psychophysics ToolbxOpen sourcePTB3 ( RRID: SCR_002881)Matlab toolbox to implement psychophysical experiments

Referências

  1. Fried, I., Rutishauser, U., Cerf, M., Kreiman, G. . Single Neuron Studies of the Human Brain: Probing Cognition. , (2014).
  2. Minxha, J., Mamelak, A. N., Rutishauser, U., Sillitoe, R. V. Surgical and Electrophysiological Techniques for Single-Neuron Recordings ....

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