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Direct recordings of grid-like neuronal activity in human spatial navigation

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Abstract

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex appear to represent spatial location via a triangular coordinate system. Such cells, which have been identified in rats, bats and monkeys, are believed to support a wide range of spatial behaviors. Recording neuronal activity from neurosurgical patients performing a virtual-navigation task, we identified cells exhibiting grid-like spiking patterns in the human brain, suggesting that humans and simpler animals rely on homologous spatial-coding schemes.

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Figure 1: Virtual navigation task.
Figure 2: Examples of grid-like spatial firing.
Figure 3: Population measurements of cells exhibiting significant grid-like spatial firing.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the patients for participating in our study. We thank K. Lee, D. Wyeth, E. Wyeth, D. Pourshaban, E. Behnke and T. Fields for technical assistance. This work was supported by US National Institutes of Health grants MH061975 and NS033221.

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Author notes

  1. Itzhak Fried and Michael J Kahana: These authors contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biomedical Engineering, Science and Health Systems, Drexel University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Joshua Jacobs & Jonathan F Miller

  2. Department of Psychology, Swansea University, Swansea, UK

    Christoph T Weidemann

  3. Princeton Neuroscience Institute, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, USA

    Alec Solway

  4. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    John F Burke, Xue-Xin Wei & Michael J Kahana

  5. Department of Neurosurgery, David Geffen School of Medicine and Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, California, USA

    Nanthia Suthana & Itzhak Fried

  6. Department of Neurology, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Michael R Sperling

  7. Department of Neurosurgery, Thomas Jefferson University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA

    Ashwini D Sharan

  8. Functional Neurosurgery Unit, Tel-Aviv Medical Center and Sackler Faculty of Medicine, Tel-Aviv University, Tel-Aviv, Israel

    Itzhak Fried

Authors
  1. Joshua Jacobs
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  2. Christoph T Weidemann
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  3. Jonathan F Miller
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  4. Alec Solway
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  5. John F Burke
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  6. Xue-Xin Wei
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  7. Nanthia Suthana
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  8. Michael R Sperling
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  9. Ashwini D Sharan
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  10. Itzhak Fried
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  11. Michael J Kahana
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Contributions

The experiment was designed by J.J., C.T.W., M.J.K., A.S. and I.F. Data were collected by J.J., C.T.W., J.F.M., J.F.B., I.F., M.R.S., A.D.S. and N.S. Data analyses were performed by J.J., X.-X.W., C.T.W., A.S. and M.J.K. J.J. and M.J.K. wrote the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Joshua Jacobs, Itzhak Fried or Michael J Kahana.

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Competing interests

The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–6 and Supplementary Tables 1–3 (PDF 2170 kb)

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Jacobs, J., Weidemann, C., Miller, J. et al. Direct recordings of grid-like neuronal activity in human spatial navigation. Nat Neurosci 16, 1188–1190 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.3466

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