1. We recorded responses from neurons in area V1 of the alert macaque monkey to textured patterns modeled after stimuli used in psychophysical experiments of pop-out. Neuronal responses to a single oriented line segment placed within a cell's classical receptive field (CRF) were compared with responses in which the center element was surrounded by rings of elements placed entirely outside the CRF. The orientations of the surround elements either matched the center element, were orthogonal to it, or were random. 2. The addition of the textured surround tended to suppress the response to the center element by an average of 34%. Overall, almost 80% of the 122 cells analyzed in detail were significantly suppressed by at least one of the texture surrounds. 3. Cells tended to respond more strongly to a stimulus in which there was a contrast in orientation between the center and surround than to a stimulus lacking such contrast. The average difference was 9% of the response to the optimally oriented center element alone. For the 32% of the cells showing a statistically significant orientation contrast effect, the average difference was 28%. 4. Both the general suppression and orientation contrast effects originated from surround regions at the ends of the center bar as well as regions along the sides of the center bar. 5. The amount of suppression induced by the texture surround decreased as the density of the texture elements decreased. 6. Both the general suppression and the orientation contrast effects appeared early in the population response to the stimuli. The general suppression effect took approximately 7 ms to develop, whereas the orientation contrast effect took 18-20 ms to develop. 7. These results are consistent with a possible functional role of V1 cells in the mediation of perceptual pop-out and in the segregation of texture borders. Possible anatomic substrates of the effects are discussed.

Hippocampal place cells are a model system of how the brain constructs cognitive representations and of how these representations support complex behavior, learning, and memory. There is, however, a lack of detailed knowledge about the properties of hippocampal afferents. We recorded multiple single units from the hippocampus and the medial and lateral entorhinal areas of behaving rats. Although many medial entorhinal neurons had highly specific place fields, lateral entorhinal neurons displayed weak spatial specificity. This finding demonstrates a fundamental dissociation between the information conveyed to the hippocampus by its major input streams, with spatial information represented by the medial and nonspatial information represented by the lateral entorhinal cortex.

The encoding of time and its binding to events are crucial for episodic memory, but how these processes are carried out in hippocampal-entorhinal circuits is unclear. Here we show in freely foraging rats that temporal information is robustly encoded across time scales from seconds to hours within the overall population state of the lateral entorhinal cortex. Similarly pronounced encoding of time was not present in the medial entorhinal cortex or in hippocampal areas CA3-CA1. When animals' experiences were constrained by behavioural tasks to become similar across repeated trials, the encoding of temporal flow across trials was reduced, whereas the encoding of time relative to the start of trials was improved. The findings suggest that populations of lateral entorhinal cortex neurons represent time inherently through the encoding of experience. This representation of episodic time may be integrated with spatial inputs from the medial entorhinal cortex in the hippocampus, allowing the hippocampus to store a unified representation of what, where and when.