Abstract
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex allow for the precise decoding of position in space. Along with potentially playing an important role in navigation, grid cells have recently been hypothesized to make a general contribution to mental operations. A prerequisite for this hypothesis is that grid cell activity does not critically depend on physical movement. Here, we show that movement of covert attention, without any physical movement, also elicits spatial receptive fields with a triangular tiling of space. In monkeys trained to maintain central fixation while covertly attending to a stimulus moving in the periphery we identified a significant population (20/141, 14% neurons at a FDR <5%) of entorhinal cells with spatially structured receptive fields. This contrasts with recordings obtained in the hippocampus, where grid-like representations were not observed. Our results provide evidence that neurons in macaque entorhinal cortex do not rely on physical movement.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | e31745 |
| Journal | eLife |
| Volume | 7 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Mar 14 2018 |
| Externally published | Yes |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:This study was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants MH080007 (EAB) and MH093807 (EAB), and the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) Grants P51OD010425 (Washington National Primate Research Center) and P51OD011132 (Yerkes National Primate Research Center), the FP7 project eSMCs IST-270212 (NW, PK) and SFB 936 (B6) Multi-Site Communication in the Brain (PK).
Funding Information:
This study was supported by National Institutes of Health Grants MH080007 (EAB) and MH093807 (EAB), and the Office of Research Infrastructure Programs (ORIP) Grants P51OD010425 (Washington National Primate Research Center) and P51OD011132 (Yerkes National Primate Research Center), the FP7 project eSMCs IST-270212 (NW, PK) and SFB 936 (B6) Multi-Site Communication in the Brain (PK). National Institutes of Health Elizabeth A Buffalo Office of Research Infrastructure Programs Elizabeth A Buffalo European Commission Niklas Wilming Peter König Deutsche Forschungsge-meinschaft Peter König The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Publisher Copyright:
© Wilming et al.