Abstract
SUMMARY The dorsomedial posterior parietal cortex is part of a higher-cognition network implicated in elaborate processes underpinning memory formation, recollection, episodes reconstruction, and temporal processing. Neural coding for complex episodic processing is however largely undocumented. Here we revealed a set of neural codes of “neuroethogram” in the primate parietal cortex. Analyzing neural responses in macaque dmPPC to naturalistic videos, we discovered several groups of neurons that are sensitive to categories of ethogram-items and to low-level sensory features. The amount of information coded within these multiplex representations in turn increases our trained classifier decodability for different video-types. We further discovered that the processing of category and feature information by these neurons is sustained by accumulation of temporal information over a long timescale, corroborating its role at the apex of the cortical hierarchy of temporal receptive windows. Taken altogether, these neural findings explain how dorsomedial PPC weaves fabrics of ongoing experiences together in real-time and realize a multiplex representation of an organism’s past. The high dimensionality of neural representations should motivate us to shift the focus of attention from pure selectivity neurons to mixed selectivity neurons, especially in increasingly complex naturalistic task designs.
HIGHLIGHTS
Neural codes for “neuroethogram” in macaque dorsomedial parietal cortex
Parietal neural codes exhibit mixed selectivity of event features
Dorsomedial PPC neurons support a long temporal receptive window for episodes
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Footnotes
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