Topic: firing fields

Measurements from hippocampal place cells in small enclosures have led to a classical view of highly stereotyped neural tuning functions with smooth, unimodal tuning fields that uniformly tile the environment. However, recent experiments conducted in large spaces across multiple species have revealed a much more irregular neural code than suggested by the classical view. Indeed, place cells in large environments typically fire in multiple locations, and the multiple firing fields of individual cells, as well as those of the entire population, vary considerably in size and shape. We recently sh

When animals navigate on a two-dimensional (2D) surface, many neurons in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are activated as the animal passes through multiple locations (‘firing fields’) arranged in a hexagonal lattice that tiles the locomotion-surface; these neurons are known as grid cells. However, although our world is three-dimensional (3D), the 3D volumetric representation in MEC remains unknown. Here we recorded MEC cells in freely-flying bats and found several classes of spatial neurons, including 3D border cells, 3D head-direction cells, and neurons with multiple 3D firing-fields. Man