Mounting evidence in neuroscience suggests the possibility of neuronal representations that individual neurons serve as the substrates of different mental representations in a point-to-point way. Combined with associationism, it can potentially address a range of theoretical problems and provide a straightforward explanation for our cognition. However, this idea is merely a hypothesis with many questions unsolved. In this paper, I will bring up a new framework to defend the idea of neuronal representations. The strategy is from micro-to macro-level. Specifically, in the micro-level, I first propose that our brain' prefers and preserves more active neurons. Yet as total chance of discharge, neurons must take strategies to fire more strongly and frequently. Then I describe how they take synaptic plasticity, inhibition, and synchronization as their strategies and demonstrate how the execution of these strategies during turn them into specialized neurons that selectively but strongly respond to familiar entities. In the macro-level, I further discuss how these specialized neurons underlie various cognitive functions and phenomena. Significantly, this paper, through defending neuronal representation, introduces a novel way to understand the relationship between brain and cognition.

Numerous studies have found that previous information can affect the current explicit working memory processing. However, the study that investigate the effect of previous episodes on the implicit working memory processing has been limited. The present study investigated this issue in healthy older adults and patients with mild cognitive impairment (MCI). A hybrid delayed-match-to-sample task was used to examine the implicit working memory processing regardless of explicit memory components. Functional magnetic resonance imaging data was collected. The behavioral results demonstrated that the previously studied information was able to facilitate the following implicit working memory processing. Nevertheless, this effect was impaired in MCI patients, although both healthy older adults and MCI patients have shown significant implicit working memory processing. Whole-brain activation analysis revealed that there were significant interactions between group and previous information (Studied and Non-studied) in the left cuneus. The psychophysiological-interaction analysis showed that the functional connectivity between left cuneus and regions in bilateral middle occipital gyrus as well as dorsal regions of left precuneus was modulated by previous episodic information in healthy older adults. However, no significant region was found in MCI patients. The current study for the first time revealed that the previous episodic information can facilitate the following implicit working memory procession in healthy older adults, and demonstrated the key cortical structure and cortical pathways underlying the interactions between previous episodic information and current implicit working memory processing.

Mounting evidence in neuroscience suggests the possibility of neuronal represen?tations that individual neurons serve as the substrates of different mental represen?tations in a point-to-point way. Combined with associationism, it can potentially ad?dress a range of theoretical problems and provide a straightforward explanation for our cognition. However, this idea is merely a hypothesis with many critical questionsunsolved. In this paper, I will bring up a new framework to defend the idea of neu?ronal representations. Specifically, I propose that our brain’s preference for more activeneurons forces neurons to gain more excitability and discharge more frequently and in?tensely to survive. In response, a neuron has to take strategies to be responsive to an input pattern frequently present and hence becomes its inner representation in effect.The demonstration of how neurons become specialized supports the idea that familiar things will be represented by specialized and dedicated neurons. And these neuronsin turn can improve our cognitive performance for familiar things.