Speed cells in the medial entorhinal cortex

By Emilio Kropff, J. Carmichael, May-Britt Moser, Edvard I. Moser. Nature, 2015

633 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex have spatial firing fields that repeat periodically in a hexagonal pattern. When animals move, activity is translated between grid cells in accordance with the animal’s displacement in the environment. For this translation to occur, grid cells must have continuous access to information about instantaneous running speed. However, a powerful entorhinal speed signal has not been identified. Here we show that running speed is represented in the firing rate of a ubiquitous but functionally dedicated population of entorhinal neurons distinct from other cell populations of the local circuit, such as grid, head-direction and border cells. These ‘speed cells’ are characterized by a context-invariant positive, linear response to running speed, and share with grid cells a prospective bias of ∼50–80 ms. Our observations point to speed cells as a key component of the dynamic representation of self-location in the medial entorhinal cortex.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3bff90c1cd8eeaadb572278c2d3eddae1b9e967e

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Distinct Contribution of Adult-Born Hippocampal Granule Cells to Context Encoding (2016, positive): “Although our behavioral paradigm did not allow for the systematic study of time coding (Kraus et al., 2013; MacDonald et al., 2011) in the GC population, we did not find that GC activity was related to other dimensions of the task, such as reward or velocity (Kropff et al., 2015).”
Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, background): “The brain’s spatial navigation system (25, 38) further includes head direction cells conveying information about the animal’s head direction (39), goal and goal direction cells signaling egocentric directions to navigational goals (40, 41), speed cells sensitive to running speed (42), and border (43”