Environmental deformations dynamically shift the grid cell spatial metric

Elife. 2018 Oct 22:7:e38169. doi: 10.7554/eLife.38169.

Abstract

In familiar environments, the firing fields of entorhinal grid cells form regular triangular lattices. However, when the geometric shape of the environment is deformed, these time-averaged grid patterns are distorted in a grid scale-dependent and local manner. We hypothesized that this distortion in part reflects dynamic anchoring of the grid code to displaced boundaries, possibly through border cell-grid cell interactions. To test this hypothesis, we first reanalyzed two existing rodent grid rescaling datasets to identify previously unrecognized boundary-tethered shifts in grid phase that contribute to the appearance of rescaling. We then demonstrated in a computational model that boundary-tethered phase shifts, as well as scale-dependent and local distortions of the time-averaged grid pattern, could emerge from border-grid interactions without altering inherent grid scale. Together, these results demonstrate that environmental deformations induce history-dependent shifts in grid phase, and implicate border-grid interactions as a potential mechanism underlying these dynamics.

Keywords: computational model; deformation; entorhinal cortex; grid cell; hippocampus; neuroscience; place cell; rat.

Publication types

  • Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural
  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't
  • Research Support, U.S. Gov't, Non-P.H.S.

MeSH terms

  • Animals
  • Computer Simulation
  • Entorhinal Cortex / physiology*
  • Grid Cells / physiology*
  • Models, Neurological
  • Rats
  • Space Perception*