Abstract
Study of the neural code for space in rodents has many insights to offer for how mammals, including humans, construct a mental representation of space. This code is centered on the hippocampal place cells, which are active in particular places in the environment. Place cells are informed by numerous other spatial cell types including grid cells, which provide a signal for distance and direction and are thought to help anchor the place cell signal. These neurons combine self-motion and environmental information to create and update their map-like representation. Study of their activity patterns in complex environments of varying structure has revealed that this "cognitive map" of space is not a fixed and rigid entity that permeates space, but rather is variably affected by the movement constraints of the environment. These findings are pointing toward a more flexible spatial code in which the map is adapted to the movement possibilities of the space. An as-yet-unanswered question is whether these different forms of representation have functional consequences, as suggested by an enactivist view of spatial cognition.
Highlights
Spatial cognition has been an intensive focus of study in psychology for many decades, and in neuroscience ever since the 1970s when O’Keefe reported the discovery of “place cells” in the rat hippocampus (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky 1971), opening the door to the neuroscientific understanding of the representation of space
Place cells are considered to form the core of a memory system that is built upon the foundations of a spatial map, and the question of interest here is how this map, often called the cognitive map, is structured
Evidence will be presented suggesting that the cognitive map is not fixed and rigid, like an artificial map, This article is a contribution to the proceedings of the “8th International Conference on Spatial Cognition: Cognition and Action in a Plurality of Spaces” (ICSC 2021)
Summary
Spatial cognition has been an intensive focus of study in psychology for many decades, and in neuroscience ever since the 1970s when O’Keefe reported the discovery of “place cells” in the rat hippocampus (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky 1971), opening the door to the neuroscientific understanding of the representation of space. The properties of place cells were thoroughly characterized early on and they were shown to be multi-modal, non-topographic (that is, not spatially arranged in the brain in a way that maps to the outside world), sensitive to environmental change and present in all mammals investigated Their discovery immediately led to a question: how does a place cell know when it should fire? Later experiments in which rats were placed in non-rectilinear environments (such as a trapezoid) found deformation of the grid (Jeffery 2015; Krupic et al 2015; Stensola et al 2015) In these cases the deformation was present right from the first exposure, suggesting an immediate tension between the boundaries and the self-motion signals. That grid cells and/or border cells are the means by which place cells are able to assess the distance of the animal from a boundary in a given direction
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