title: Independent Neuronal Representation of Facial and Vocal Identity in the Monkey Hippocampus and Inferotemporal Cortex.
abstract: Social interactions make up to a large extent the prime material of episodic memories. We therefore asked how social signals are coded by neurons in the hippocampus. Human hippocampus is home to neurons representing familiar individuals in an abstract and invariant manner ( Quian Quiroga et al. 2009). In contradistinction, activity of rat hippocampal cells is only weakly altered by the presence of other rats ( von Heimendahl et al. 2012; Zynyuk et al. 2012). We probed the activity of monkey hippocampal neurons to faces and voices of familiar and unfamiliar individuals (monkeys and humans). Thirty-one percent of neurons recorded without prescreening responded to faces or to voices. Yet responses to faces were more informative about individuals than responses to voices and neuronal responses to facial and vocal identities were not correlated, indicating that in our sample identity information was not conveyed in an invariant manner like in human neurons. Overall, responses displayed by monkey hippocampal neurons were similar to the ones of neurons recorded simultaneously in inferotemporal cortex, whose role in face perception is established. These results demonstrate that the monkey hippocampus participates in the read-out of social information contrary to the rat hippocampus, but possibly lack an explicit conceptual coding of as found in humans.
authors.affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Lyon 1, Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, 69675 Bron, France.
authors.forename: Julia
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sliwa
authors.affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Lyon 1, Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, 69675 Bron, France.
authors.forename: Aurélie
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Planté
authors.affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Lyon 1, Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, 69675 Bron, France.
authors.forename: Jean-René
authors.initials: JR
authors.lastname: Duhamel
authors.affiliation: Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - Université Lyon 1, Centre de Neuroscience Cognitive, 69675 Bron, France.
authors.forename: Sylvia
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Wirth
mesh_terms: D000161:Acoustic Stimulation; D000200:Action Potentials; D000819:Animal Communication; D000818:Animals; D001307:Auditory Perception / Q000502:physiology*; D005145:Face; D006624:Hippocampus / Q000502:physiology*; D008253:Macaca mulatta; D008297:Male; D008839:Microelectrodes; D009474:Neurons / Q000502:physiology*; D009483:Neuropsychological Tests; D046709:Pattern Recognition, Physiological / Q000502:physiology*; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D021641:Recognition, Psychology / Q000502:physiology; D012938:Social Perception; D013702:Temporal Lobe / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*
keywords: area TE; individual recognition; medial temporal lobe (MTL); single-unit; superior temporal sulcus (STS)