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Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement

Niklas Wilming, View ORCID ProfilePeter König, Seth König, Elizabeth A. Buffalo
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/183327
Niklas Wilming
1University of Osnabrück, Institute of Cognitive Science, Albrechtstraße 28, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany
2Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Washington National Primate Research Center, 1705 NE Pacific Street, HSB Box 357290, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
3University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, Martinistraße 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany
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Peter König
1University of Osnabrück, Institute of Cognitive Science, Albrechtstraße 28, 49069 Osnabrück, Germany
3University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Department of Neurophysiology and Pathophysiology, Martinistraße 52, 20246 Hamburg, Germany
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Seth König
2Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Washington National Primate Research Center, 1705 NE Pacific Street, HSB Box 357290, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
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Elizabeth A. Buffalo
2Department of Physiology and Biophysics, University of Washington School of Medicine, Washington National Primate Research Center, 1705 NE Pacific Street, HSB Box 357290, Seattle, WA 98195, USA
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Abstract

Grid cells have been identified in the entorhinal cortex in a variety of species and allow for the precise decoding of position in space (1–7). Along with potentially playing an important role in navigation, grid cells have recently been hypothesized to make a general contribution to mental operations, including remembering the past and thinking about the future (8,9). A prerequisite for this hypothesis is that grid cell activity does not critically depend on physical movement. Directed attention, which contributes to virtually all mental operations and can be separated from physical movement provides a good test case to investigate this hypothesis. Overt attention in the form of fixational eye movements leads to grid-like firing fields in the monkey entorhinal cortex (3). Here we show that movement of covert attention, without any physical movement, also elicits spatial receptive fields with a triangular tiling of the space. In monkeys trained to maintain central fixation while covertly attending to a stimulus moving in the periphery we identified a significant population (20/141, 14% neurons at a FDR<5%) of entorhinal cells with spatially structured receptive fields. Further, we were able to identify a population of neurons that were labeled as grid cells on an individual basis. This contrast with our recordings obtained in the hippocampus, where grid-like representations were not observed. Our results provide compelling evidence that neurons in macaque entorhinal cortex do not rely on physical movement. Notably, these results support the notion that grid cells may be capable of serving a variety of different cognitive functions and suggest that grid cells are a versatile component of many neural algorithms.

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The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 International license.
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Posted September 01, 2017.
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Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement
Niklas Wilming, Peter König, Seth König, Elizabeth A. Buffalo
bioRxiv 183327; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/183327
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Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement
Niklas Wilming, Peter König, Seth König, Elizabeth A. Buffalo
bioRxiv 183327; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/183327

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