Visual landmarks sharpen grid cell metric and confer context specificity to neurons of the medial entorhinal cortex
- Heidelberg University, Germany
Abstract
Neurons of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) provide spatial representations critical for navigation. In this network, the periodic firing fields of grid cells act as a metric element for position. The location of the grid firing fields depends on interactions between self-motion information, geometrical properties of the environment and nonmetric contextual cues. Here, we test whether visual information, including nonmetric contextual cues, also regulates the firing rate of MEC neurons. Removal of visual landmarks caused a profound impairment in grid cell periodicity. Moreover, the speed code of MEC neurons changed in darkness and the activity of border cells became less confined to environmental boundaries. Half of the MEC neurons changed their firing rate in darkness. Manipulations of nonmetric visual cues that left the boundaries of a 1D environment in place caused rate changes in grid cells. These findings reveal context specificity in the rate code of MEC neurons.
Data availability
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Data from: Visual landmarks sharpen grid cell metric and confer context specificity to neurons of the medial entorhinal cortexAvailable at Dryad Digital Repository under a CC0 Public Domain Dedication.
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Author details
Funding
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (AL 1730/1-1)
- Kevin Allen
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SFB 1134)
- Kevin Allen
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Ethics
Animal experimentation: All experiments were carried out in accordance with the European Committees Directive (86/609/EEC) and were approved by the Governmental Supervisory Panel on Animal Experiments of Baden-Württemberg at Karlsruhe (35-9185.81/G-113/10). Every effort was made to minimize suffering.
Copyright
© 2016, Pérez-Escobar et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Visual landmarks sharpen grid cell metric and confer context specificity to neurons of the medial entorhinal cortex
eLife 5:e16937.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.16937
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