Grid cells form a global representation of connected environments.

ABSTRACT: The firing patterns of grid cells in medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) and associated brain areas form triangular arrays that tessellate the environment [1, 2] and maintain constant spatial offsets to each other between environments [3, 4]. These cells are thought to provide an efficient metric for navigation in large-scale space [5-8]. However, an accurate and universal metric requires grid cell firing patterns to uniformly cover the space to be navigated, in contrast to recent demonstrations that environmental features such as boundaries can distort [9-11] and fragment [12] grid patterns. To establish whether grid firing is determined by local environmental cues, or provides a coherent global representation, we recorded mEC grid cells in rats foraging in an environment containing two percep

SUBMITTER: Carpenter F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4425461 | biostudies-literature | 2015 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature