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Experience-dependent rescaling of entorhinal grids

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Abstract

The firing pattern of entorhinal 'grid cells' is thought to provide an intrinsic metric for space. We report a strong experience-dependent environmental influence: the spatial scales of the grids (which are aligned and have fixed relative sizes within each animal) vary parametrically with changes to a familiar environment's size and shape. Thus grid scale reflects an interaction between intrinsic, path-integrative calculation of location and learned associations to the external environment.

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Figure 1: Rescaling of grid cell firing in response to environmental deformation.
Figure 2: Magnitude of rescaling and effect of experience.
Figure 3: Grid asymmetry is experience dependent and grid sizes are clustered within rat.

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Acknowledgements

The authors thank C. Lever and J. O'Keefe for useful comments and D. Kellett and S. Burton for assistance with histology. This work was supported by UK Medical Research Council (MRC) and UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, 17 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AR, UK

    Caswell Barry & Neil Burgess

  2. Department of Anatomy, University College London, Gower St., London, WC1E 6BT, UK

    Caswell Barry & Neil Burgess

  3. Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK

    Caswell Barry, Robin Hayman & Kathryn J Jeffery

  4. Department of Psychology, University College London, 26 Bedford Way, London, WC1H 0AP, UK

    Caswell Barry, Robin Hayman & Kathryn J Jeffery

Authors
  1. Caswell Barry
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  2. Robin Hayman
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  3. Neil Burgess
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  4. Kathryn J Jeffery
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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Fig. 1

Cresyl violet stained saggital sections section showing typical recording locations. (PDF 8696 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 2

Cells accepted into the analysis (see Supplementary Methods for acceptance criteria). (PDF 343 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 3

Grid firing rescales in response to geometric changes made to animals' enclosures – data from several rats. (PDF 1586 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 4

Orientation of grids in each rat. (PDF 350 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 5

Grid scale clustering within rats. (PDF 167 kb)

Supplementary Fig. 6

Grid rescaling is experience dependent and independent between contexts. (PDF 400 kb)

Supplementary Table 1

Mean normalized rescaling by rat for manipulated axes and unchanged axes. (PDF 56 kb)

Supplementary Table 2

Correlation (Spearman's rank correlation coefficient) between exposure (number of recording sessions) and rescaling for each rat. (PDF 63 kb)

Supplementary Methods (PDF 313 kb)

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Barry, C., Hayman, R., Burgess, N. et al. Experience-dependent rescaling of entorhinal grids. Nat Neurosci 10, 682–684 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1905

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nn1905

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