Florian Mormann, University of Bonn, Germany
The human medial temporal lobe contains neurons that respond selectively to the semantic contents of a presented stimulus. These "concept cells" may respond to very different pictures of a given person and even to their written or spoken name. Their response latency is far longer than necessary for object recognition, they follow subjective, conscious perception, and they are found in brain regions that are crucial for declarative memory formation. It has thus been hypothesized that they may represent the semantic "building blocks" of episodic memories.
In this talk I will present data from single unit recordings in the hippocampus, entorhinal cortex, parahippocampal cortex, piriform cortex, and amygdala during paradigms involving perception as well as coding of episodic memories in order to characterize the role of concept cells in these cognitive functions.
BIO
Prof. Dr. Dr. Florian Mormann is a distinguished neuroscientist at the University of Bonn, specializing in Cognitive Neurophysiology and Clinical Neurophysiology. His research focuses on the neurobiology of perception and memory, as well as the pathophysiological mechanisms leading to epileptic seizures. Mormann's workgroup conducts research on neuronal behavior in the medial temporal lobe, understanding how conscious percepts are transferred into episodic memory traces. He has made significant contributions to the field, including studies on scene-selective coding by single neurons in the human parahippocampal cortex and the encoding of face identity by neurons in the human amygdala. His research has been published in prestigious journals such as Nature and Nature Communications, and he has received Marie Curie Outgoing International Fellowship from the European Commission.