Grid cell symmetry is shaped by environmental geometry

By Julija Krupic, Marius Bauza, S. Burton, C. Barry, John O'Keefe. Nature, 2015

343 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Grid cells represent an animal’s location by firing in multiple fields arranged in a striking hexagonal array. Such an impressive and constant regularity prompted suggestions that grid cells represent a universal and environmental-invariant metric for navigation. Originally the properties of grid patterns were believed to be independent of the shape of the environment and this notion has dominated almost all theoretical grid cell models. However, several studies indicate that environmental boundaries influence grid firing, though the strength, nature and longevity of this effect is unclear. Here we show that grid orientation, scale, symmetry and homogeneity are strongly and permanently affected by environmental geometry. We found that grid patterns orient to the walls of polarized enclosures such as squares, but not circles. Furthermore, the hexagonal grid symmetry is permanently broken in highly polarized environments such as trapezoids, the pattern being more elliptical and less homogeneous. Our results provide compelling evidence for the idea that environmental boundaries compete with the internal organization of the grid cell system to drive grid firing. Notably, grid cell activity is more local than previously thought and as a consequence cannot provide a universal spatial metric in all environments.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/64525dcf13d26321f43c5fc2d21c204012d4140a

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Using Grid Cells for Navigation (2015, background): “Several studies have demonstrated that grid ﬁring patterns in isolated environments can become distorted or fragmented by local boundaries (Barry et al., 2007; Derdikman et al., 2009; Krupic et al., 2015; Stensola et al., 2015).”
Attractor and integrator networks in the brain (2021, background): “This has been verified in the case of the expansion of grid cells in novel environments [76] and is almost certain to hold – given the preponderance of evidence of internal grid stability [166, 76, 180, 100, 101, 20] – when tested in various other conditions that report grid deformations as well [17”