Journal
CURRENT BIOLOGY
Volume 25, Issue 9, Pages 1176-1182Publisher
CELL PRESS
DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2015.02.037
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Funding
- Wellcome Trust
- UK Medical Research Council
- Royal Society
- E.U. SpaceCog and Human Brain Project
- BBSRC [BB/J009792/1] Funding Source: UKRI
- MRC [G1002276, G0300117, G1100669] Funding Source: UKRI
- Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/J009792/1] Funding Source: researchfish
- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [1220994] Funding Source: researchfish
- Medical Research Council [G1100669, G0300117, G1002276] Funding Source: researchfish
- Wellcome Trust [101208/Z/13/Z, 103896/Z/14/Z] Funding Source: researchfish
- Wellcome Trust [101208/Z/13/Z] Funding Source: Wellcome Trust
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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 perceptually identical compartments connected via a corridor. During initial exposures to the multicompartment environment, grid firing patterns were dominated by local environmental cues, replicating between the two compartments. However, with prolonged experience, grid cell firing patterns formed a single, continuous representation that spanned both compartments. Thus, we provide the first evidence that in a complex environment, grid cell firing can form the coherent global pattern necessary for them to act as a metric capable of supporting large-scale spatial navigation.
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