Cosyne 2007 Workshops
February 26-27, 2007
The Canyons, Utah
Neil Burgess
Environmental influence on grid cells - interaction with place cells?
Caswell Barry, Dmitry Laptev, Robin Hayman, Kate Jeffery, Neil Burgess
The proposal that place cells serve to tie grid cell firing to the environment (O'Keefe and Burgess, 2005) stands in apparent contrast to the observation that grid cell firing is insensitive to deformantion of the arena boundary (Hafting et al., 2005), since place cell firing shows parametric deformation in these circumstances (O'Keefe and Burgess, 1996; Barry et al 2006). We present experimental data and simulations on the effect of arena deformation on grid cells firing. Results are consistent with grid cells performing path integration as a continuous attractor, but also receiving input from place cells responding to the envrionmental boundary. The possibility of an alternative oscillatory interference mechanism for grid cell firing (O'Keefe and Burgess, 2005) is also considered.
Barry C, Lever C, Hayman R, Hartley T, Burton S, O'Keefe J, Jeffery KJ, Burgess N (2006) The boundary vector cell model of place cell firing and spatial memory. Rev. Neurosci. 17 71-97.
Hafting T, Fyhn M, Molden S, Moser MB, Moser EI (2005) Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature 436 801-806.
O'Keefe J. and Burgess N. (1996) Geometric determinants of the place fields of hippocampal neurones, Nature 381 425-428.
