Andreas Herz, LMU München; BCCN Munich

The Many Ways to Read from Grid Cells

Mammalian grid cells discharge when the animal crosses the points of an imaginary hexagonal grid tessellating the environment. The spatial scales of these lattices take discrete values that form a geometric series. Within a grid-cell module, all cells share the same scale and orientation but differ in their spatial phase. In addition, grid cells exhibit theta-phase precession and the firing rates of each cell tend to differ from field to field. I will show that this peculiar arrangement leads to (at least) three complimentary codes for spatial location. But there is even more: For goal-directed navigation, one of these representations can be flexible transformed into egocentric goal coordinates needed for planning movements. The results show that the grid-cell code provides a powerful and versatile substrate for spatial location and navigation that might generalize to other cognitive domains.

Additional Information

Symposium talk; registration is necessary

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BCCN Berlin