Fig. 1: Experiment and electrode locations.

a–d, Schematics of the three task stages. During encoding (a,b), the participants watched a series of silent clips and were instructed to answer yes/no questions that appeared randomly after every four to eight clips²⁶. These clips contained either cuts to scenes from the same or a different movie (a, boundary clips) or no cuts (b, no-boundary clips). The red triangle in a marks the time point of the boundary in an example boundary clip. The grey triangle in b indicates the time point of four seconds in an example no-boundary clip. During scene recognition (c), the participants were presented with a static image and were asked to indicate whether the image was ‘old’ (shown in the watched clips) or ‘new’. During time discrimination (d), the participants were presented with two images side by side and were asked to indicate whether the left or right frame appeared first in the watched clips. See ref. ²⁶ for more detailed information about the task. Due to copyright restrictions, the example images shown here are not the original stimuli used in the experiments. All images were generated by the authors. e, Locations of the 50 microelectrodes in the MTL across 22 participants (see the participants’ demographics in Supplementary Table 1) that had phase precession neurons. Shown is a slice from the template brain CIT168 (Methods), with microelectrodes plotted as individual dots and colour-coded for different brain regions (cyan for the amygdala, yellow for the hippocampus and red for the parahippocampal gyrus). The MNI coordinates for all microelectrodes in the plot are listed in Supplementary Table 2.