Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
Restricted accessReview article

Independence of landmark and self-motion-guided navigation: a different role for grid cells

Bruno Poucet

Bruno Poucet

Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives UMR 7291, Fédération 3C FR 3512, Marseille, France

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Francesca Sargolini

Francesca Sargolini

Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives UMR 7291, Fédération 3C FR 3512, Marseille, France

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Eun Y. Song

Eun Y. Song

Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, SUNY Downstate Med Ctr, Brooklyn, New York 11203, USA

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Balázs Hangya

Balázs Hangya

Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Cold Spring Harbor, New York 11724, USA

Laboratory of Cerebral Cortex Research, Institute of Experimental Medicine, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, H-1083, Hungary

[email protected]

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Steven Fox

Steven Fox

Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, SUNY Downstate Med Ctr, Brooklyn, New York 11203, USA

[email protected]

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Robert U. Muller

Robert U. Muller

Department of Physiology and Pharmacology, SUNY Downstate Med Ctr, Brooklyn, New York 11203, USA

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Published:https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2013.0370

    Recent interest in the neural bases of spatial navigation stems from the discovery of neuronal populations with strong, specific spatial signals. The regular firing field arrays of medial entorhinal grid cells suggest that they may provide place cells with distance information extracted from the animal's self-motion, a notion we critically review by citing new contrary evidence. Next, we question the idea that grid cells provide a rigid distance metric. We also discuss evidence that normal navigation is possible using only landmarks, without self-motion signals. We then propose a model that supposes that information flow in the navigational system changes between light and dark conditions. We assume that the true map-like representation is hippocampal and argue that grid cells have a crucial navigational role only in the dark. In this view, their activity in the light is predominantly shaped by landmarks rather than self-motion information, and so follows place cell activity; in the dark, their activity is determined by self-motion cues and controls place cell activity. A corollary is that place cell activity in the light depends on non-grid cells in ventral medial entorhinal cortex. We conclude that analysing navigational system changes between landmark and no-landmark conditions will reveal key functional properties.

    Footnotes

    One contribution of 24 to a Theo Murphy Meeting Issue ‘Space in the brain: cells, circuits, codes and cognition’.

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