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Graduate Student Award Winner 

Concept cells in the temporal pole and the posterior cingulate cortex: testing memory systems at the neuronal level?

Poster Session B - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom
Also presenting in Data Blitz Session 4 - Saturday, March 7, 2026, 10:30 am – 12:00 pm PST, Salon F.

Vincent Dornier¹ (), Leila Reddy¹, Aube Darves-Bornoz¹, Adrien Causse², Luc Valton^1,3, Marie Denuelle^1,3, Jean-Albert Lotterie^4,5, Amaury de Barros^4,6, Annabelle Goujon⁷, Jonathan Curot^1,3, Emmanuel J. Barbeau¹; ¹Univ Toulouse, CNRS, Brain and cognition research centre (CerCo), Toulouse, France, ²Medical Research Council Brain Network Dynamics Unit, Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, ³Electrophysiology, epilepsy & sleep unit, Toulouse University Hospital, ⁴Univ Toulouse, INSERM, TONIC, Toulouse, France, ⁵Stereotactic radiosurgery, Toulouse University Hospital, ⁶Neurosurgery, Toulouse University Hospital, ⁷Université Marie et Louis Pasteur, INSERM, UMR 1322 LINC, F-25000 Besançon, France

Extracellular recordings have identified neurons selective to one particular concept, concept cells, in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures as the building blocks of declarative memory. These concept cells demonstrate strong semantic properties. Finding such selective neurons within the MTL structures presents a paradox given that it is the temporal pole (TP) that is widely regarded as the primary hub for semantic memory. We recorded the activity from > 1000 neurons across 20 patients implanted with tetrodes from several regions including the TP (n=177) and the MTL (n=388) while they watched pictures of various famous faces, buildings, common objects or written names. Among these, neurons in the TP displayed several characteristics of concept cells: invariant, multimodal and selective responses, explicit representations of concepts and semantic coding as highlighted by comparing neuronal activity with embeddings of concepts in language models. Neurons in the TP also had shorter response latencies than the ones in the hippocampus suggesting processing in the TP before transfer to the hippocampus. Altogether, these results support the idea that neurons in the TP are the neuronal basis of semantic knowledge. We did not record concept cells in other brain areas except from the posterior cingulate cortex where response latencies occurred later than in temporal regions. Altogether these findings provide novel insights into the neuronal coding of memory in the human brain and enable to evaluate the functional organization of memory at the neuronal scale.

Topic Area: LONG-TERM MEMORY: Semantic