Hippocampus serves as a repository for spoken and heard word meanings during conversations
Ana G. Chavez, Xinyuan YaniD, Melissa C. FranchiD, Elizabeth A. MickiewicziD, Will Baltazar, James L. Belanger, Davin DevaraiD, Maya Etta, Thomas Hamre, Taha Ismail, Brad JoineriD, Yoon Hee KimiD, Abhinav Kona, Kasra A. MansourianiD, Amy Nangia, Molly PluennekeiD, Sarah S. SoubraiD, Thara Venkateswaran, Karthik Venkudusamy, Assia ChericoniiD, Katherine E. KabotyanskiiD, Kalman A. KatlowitziD, Raissa K. MathuraiD, Tarana NigamiD, Danika Lea PauloiD, , Benjamin Y. HaydeniD
Abstract
We utilize internal representations of meaning for two purposes: to understand the words we hear and to generate our own speech. This dual requirement necessitates abstract, modality-agnostic representations. Building on work identifying it as a hub for relational mapping, we hypothesized that the hippocampus supports abstract, cross-person representations, and uses shared semantic geometries to do so. We tested this hypothesis by examining hippocampal activity in a remarkable single-neuron dataset derived from conversational speech. Neurons robustly encoded meanings of both spoken and heard words, and used common geometric embeddings for both, leading to abstract meaning performance. Speaker identity was aligned with meaning via partial subspace alignment, which affords speaker-meaning binding by partitioning meaning by speaker while maintaining cross-speaker generalization. Degrees of subspace rotation varied on a single word level and depended systematically on semantic category. Together, these findings indicate how geometric principles allow for abstract cross-personal meanings while preserving binding to speaker identity.
02 /Specification & Classification
Click any tag to browse matching papers- Citations
- 5
- Approach
Reproducibility ledger
Nobody has reported trying to reproduce this paper yet. Did you replicate an experiment or run the code? Your report saves the next lab a week.
Sign in to file a reproducibility report.
Related papers
- A population code for semantics in human hippocampus
Melissa C. Franch, Elizabeth A. Mickiewicz, … Benjamin Y. Hayden·Nature NeurosciencePeer-reviewed·Sep 30, 2026
- Shared neural geometries for bilingual semantic representations in human hippocampal neurons
Xinyuan Yan, Ana G. Chavez, … Sameer Anil Sheth·CellPeer-reviewed·Jun 24, 2026
- The hippocampus assumes a special role in supporting abstract concept representation
Alex Kafkas, Andrew R. Mayes, Daniela Montaldi·bioRxiv·Jul 4, 2023
- A semantotopic map in human hippocampus
Elizabeth A. Mickiewicz, Melissa C. Franch, … Benjamin Y. Hayden·bioRxiv·Oct 31, 2025
- Hippocampus plays a role in speech feedback processing
Vincent G. van de Ven, Lourens Waldorp, Ingrid K. Christoffels·NeuroImagePeer-reviewed·Aug 31, 2020
- Expanding the language network: Domain-specific hippocampal recruitment during high-level linguistic processing
Idan Blank, Melissa Collins Duff, … Evelina G. Fedorenko·bioRxiv·Dec 6, 2016