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Grannan, Benjamin

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Grannan

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Benjamin

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Grannan, Benjamin

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Author's Publications: search.filters.isAuthorOfPublication.5e2f7b52-9f54-4c79-8259-8a9192893c6e

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    Single-Neuronal Predictions of Others’ Beliefs in Humans
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2021-01-27) Jamali, Mohsen; Grannan, Benjamin; Fedorenko, Evelina; Saxe, Rebecca; Báez-Mendoza, Raymundo; Williams, Ziv M.
    Human social behavior crucially depends on our ability to reason about others. This capacity for ‘theory of mind’ plays a vital role in social cognition because it allows us not only to form a detailed understanding of the hidden thoughts and beliefs of other individuals but to also understand that they may differ from our own 1-4. Although a number of areas in the human brain have been linked to social reasoning 5-8 and its disruption across a variety of psychosocial conditions 9-12, the basic cellular mechanisms that underlie human theory of mind remain undefined. Using a rare opportunity to acutely record from single cells in the human dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, we discover neurons that reliably encode information about others’ beliefs across richly varying scenarios and that distinguish self- from other-belief related representations. By further following their encoding dynamics, we show how these cells represent the contents of the other’s beliefs and accurately predict whether they are true or false. We also show how they track beliefs from another’s perspective and how their activities relate to behavioral performance. Together, these findings reveal a detailed cellular process in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex for representing another’s beliefs and identify candidate neurons that could support human theory of mind.
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    Semantic encoding during language comprehension at single-cell resolution
    (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2024-07-03) Jamali, Mohsen; Grannan, Benjamin; Cai, Jing; Khanna, Arjun; Munoz Miranda, William; Caprara, Irene; Paulk, Angelique; Cash, Sydney; Fedorenko, Evelina; Williams, Ziv
    From sequences of speech sounds, or letters, humans can extract rich and nuanced meaning through language. This capacity is essential for human communication. Yet, despite a growing understanding of the brain areas that support linguistic and semantic processing, the derivation of linguistic meaning in neural tissue at the cellular level and over the timescale of action potentials remains largely unknown. Here, we recorded from single cells in the left language-dominant prefrontal cortex as participants listened to semantically diverse sentences and naturalistic stories. By tracking their activities during natural speech processing, we discover a remarkably fine scale representation of semantic information by individual neurons. These neurons responded selectively to specific word meanings and reliably distinguished words from nonwords. Their activities were also dynamic, reflecting the words’ meanings based on their specific sentence contexts and independent of their phonetic form. Modeled collectively, we show how these cell ensembles accurately predicted the broad semantic categories of the words as they were heard in real-time during speech. We also show how they encoded the hierarchical structure of these meaning representations and how they mapped onto the population’s response patterns. Together, these findings reveal a detailed organization of semantic representations by prefrontal neurons in humans and begin to illuminate the cellular-level processing of meaning during language comprehension.