RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Environmental deformations dynamically shift the grid cell spatial metric
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 174367
DO 10.1101/174367
A1 Keinath, Alexandra T
A1 Epstein, Russell A
A1 Balasubramanian, Vijay
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/05/07/174367.abstract
AB Environmental deformations induce stereotyped distortions in the time-averaged activity of grid and place cells. We hypothesized that these effects are partly driven by border cell inputs which reset the spatial phase of grid cells, maintaining learned relationships between grid phase and environmental boundaries without altering inherent grid scale. A computational model of this mechanism reproduced diverse distortions during deformations, including scale-dependent and local distortions of grid fields, and stretched, duplicated, and fractured place fields. This model predicted a striking new effect: dynamic, history-dependent, boundary-tethered ‘shifts’ in grid phase during deformations. We reanalyzed two rodent grid cell rescaling datasets and found direct evidence of these shifts, which have not been previously reported and contribute to the appearance of rescaling. These results demonstrate that the grid representation of geometrically deformed environments is not fixed, but rather dynamically changes with the specific experience of the navigator.