A Map of Visual Space in the Primate Entorhinal Cortex

By Nathaniel J. Killian, Michael J. Jutras, E. Buffalo. Nature, 2012

487 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Place-modulated activity among neurons in the hippocampal formation presents a means to organize contextual information in the service of memory formation and recall. One particular spatial representation, that of grid cells, has been observed in the entorhinal cortex (EC) of rats and bats, but has yet to be described in single units in primates. Here we examined spatial representations in the EC of head-fixed monkeys performing a free-viewing visual memory task. Individual neurons were identified in the primate EC that emitted action potentials when the monkey fixated multiple discrete locations in the visual field in each of many sequentially presented complex images. These firing fields possessed spatial periodicity similar to a triangular tiling with a corresponding well-defined hexagonal structure in the spatial autocorrelation. Further, these neurons showed theta-band oscillatory activity and changing spatial scale as a function of distance from the rhinal sulcus, which is consistent with previous findings in rodents. These spatial representations may provide a framework to anchor the encoding of stimulus content in a complex visual scene. Together, our results provide a direct demonstration of grid cells in the primate and suggest that EC neurons encode space during visual exploration, even without locomotion.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2ed2f56cd0154ecdda77a61a721a9924fc5d90b9

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Citations in the corpus

The molecular and systems biology of memory. (2014, unknown): “Images reproduced by permission from Kim (2011). (B) Diagrams depicting the dynamics of brain network fast functional connectivity in memory retrieval revealed by electrocorticographical (ECoG) recording in patients undergoing seizure monitoring.”
The mechanisms for pattern completion and pattern separation in the hippocampus (2013, background): “The presence of spatial view grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of primates (Killian et al., 2012) is of course predicted from the presence of spatial view cells in the primate CA3 and CA1 regions (Rolls et al., 1997a, 1998; Robertson et al., 1998; Georges-François et al., 1999; Rolls and Xiang,…”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “Consistent with this idea, it appears that the brain (re)uses grid and place cells when navigating through both the spatial environment and through non-spatial cognitive domains [233, 234, 235].”
Pattern separation, completion, and categorisation in the hippocampus and neocortex. (2016, background): “The presence of spatial view grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of primates (Killian et al., 2012) is of course predicted from the presence of spatial view cells in the primate CA3 and CA1 regions (Georges-François et al., 1999; Robertson et al., 1998; Rolls, 2008; Rolls, Robertson, et al., 1997;…”
A model of grid cell development through spatial exploration and spike time-dependent plasticity. (2014, unknown): “I I -45 -12 30 0 80 0 80 200 0 neuron 200 80 0 80 0 0 200 0 0 80 80 0 neuron neuron 100 0 200 0 neuron neuron 0 10 20 200 0”
Controllability of structural brain networks (2014, unknown): “• Entorhinal cortex The entorhinal cortex encodes visual information 110 .”
The restless engram: consolidations never end. (2012, background): “Images reproduced by permission from Kim (2011). (B) Diagrams depicting the dynamics of brain network fast functional connectivity in memory retrieval revealed by electrocorticographical (ECoG) recording in patients undergoing seizure monitoring.”
Understanding the neural bases of bodily self-consciousness: recent achievements and main challenges (2023, background): “For example, investigations into the neural bases of self-location (the experience of occupying a volume of space) can be linked to studies of the neural bases of spatial navigation and spatial memory, which have been deciphered in several animal models (e.g., Ulanovsky and Moss, 2007; Killian et al”