Stimulus-specific recruitment of human amygdala neurons predicts episodic memory encoding success.

Category-selective neurons in the human amygdala show elevated firing during encoding of later remembered visual stimuli, predicting episodic memory success with stimulus-specific recruitment.

• Why it matters: Encoding-to-retrieval links are crucial for understanding how experiences become long-term episodic memories and for identifying targets in disorders affecting episodic memory.
• What they did: Single-neuron activity was recorded while participants encoded novel visual stimuli and later retrieved them with confidence ratings; amygdala and hippocampus responses were compared, including spike-field coherence.
• The result: Enhanced spike-field coherence between amygdala category cells and hippocampal field potentials accompanied successful encoding, and the amygdala effect was stronger, earlier, category-restricted, and independent of valence and arousal.