In five SEEG patients, pooled tests found greater limbic VTC response similarity, but patient-level and distance-controlled tests did not

An independent Python analysis tested whether hippocampal and amygdala stimulation produces distinct response shapes in ventral temporal cortex (VTC). It used 32 bipolar VTC recording pairs from five SEEG patients in OpenNeuro ds004457, with single-pulse stimulation at 6 mA. The archived report identifies the dataset as v1.0.1; signals were read from the anonymous S3 mirror, and file hashes are preserved. The mean patient-level difference between limbic-limbic and limbic-non-limbic shape correlations was D = 0.19, positive in 3 of 5 patients (exact one-sided sign-flip p = 0.19; Holm p = 0.375). With control for log10 distance between stimulation-site midpoints, mean beta_LL = 0.06 (p = 0.41; Holm p = 0.41). Secondary pooled recording-pair permutations found D greater than chance (p = 0.0005; p = 0.0025 for the added within-patient site-label permutation), while the distance-controlled coefficient was not greater than chance (p = 0.31 and p = 0.39). Limbic responses had earlier peak deflections in all five patients (patient medians 22–57 ms versus 25–172 ms). Two patients contributed most of the shape effect. The effect was not consistent across patients and could not be separated from the short distances between limbic stimulation sites. With five patients, the smallest possible one-sided p is 1/32 = 0.031, so the non-significant patient-level tests do not show that there is no effect. The package preserves the analysis plan, code, results, provenance hashes, per-site responses, and statistics.

ventral temporal cortex · SEEG · limbic stimulation · single-pulse electrical stimulation · response shape · OpenNeuro