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The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex
Understanding the development of the neural circuits subserving specific cognitive functions such as navigation remains a central problem in neuroscience. Here, we characterize the development of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, which, by nature of their regularly spaced firing fields, ar...
Autores principales: | , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
Frontiers Media S.A.
2012
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338009/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22557949 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2012.00021 |
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author | Wills, Thomas J. Barry, Caswell Cacucci, Francesca |
author_facet | Wills, Thomas J. Barry, Caswell Cacucci, Francesca |
author_sort | Wills, Thomas J. |
collection | PubMed |
description | Understanding the development of the neural circuits subserving specific cognitive functions such as navigation remains a central problem in neuroscience. Here, we characterize the development of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, which, by nature of their regularly spaced firing fields, are thought to provide a distance metric to the hippocampal neural representation of space. Grid cells emerge at the time of weaning in the rat, at around 3 weeks of age. We investigated whether grid cells in young rats are functionally equivalent to those observed in the adult as soon as they appear, or if instead they follow a gradual developmental trajectory. We find that, from the very youngest ages at which reproducible grid firing is observed (postnatal day 19): grid cells display adult-like firing fields that tessellate to form a coherent map of the local environment; that this map is universal, maintaining its internal structure across different environments; and that grid cells in young rats, as in adults, also encode a representation of direction and speed. To further investigate the developmental processes leading up to the appearance of grid cells, we present data from individual medial entorhinal cortex cells recorded across more than 1 day, spanning the period before and after the grid firing pattern emerged. We find that increasing spatial stability of firing was correlated with increasing gridness. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-3338009 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2012 |
publisher | Frontiers Media S.A. |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-33380092012-05-03 The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex Wills, Thomas J. Barry, Caswell Cacucci, Francesca Front Neural Circuits Neuroscience Understanding the development of the neural circuits subserving specific cognitive functions such as navigation remains a central problem in neuroscience. Here, we characterize the development of grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex, which, by nature of their regularly spaced firing fields, are thought to provide a distance metric to the hippocampal neural representation of space. Grid cells emerge at the time of weaning in the rat, at around 3 weeks of age. We investigated whether grid cells in young rats are functionally equivalent to those observed in the adult as soon as they appear, or if instead they follow a gradual developmental trajectory. We find that, from the very youngest ages at which reproducible grid firing is observed (postnatal day 19): grid cells display adult-like firing fields that tessellate to form a coherent map of the local environment; that this map is universal, maintaining its internal structure across different environments; and that grid cells in young rats, as in adults, also encode a representation of direction and speed. To further investigate the developmental processes leading up to the appearance of grid cells, we present data from individual medial entorhinal cortex cells recorded across more than 1 day, spanning the period before and after the grid firing pattern emerged. We find that increasing spatial stability of firing was correlated with increasing gridness. Frontiers Media S.A. 2012-04-27 /pmc/articles/PMC3338009/ /pubmed/22557949 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2012.00021 Text en Copyright © 2012 Wills, Barry and Cacucci. http://www.frontiersin.org/licenseagreement This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial License, which permits non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited. |
spellingShingle | Neuroscience Wills, Thomas J. Barry, Caswell Cacucci, Francesca The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title | The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title_full | The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title_fullStr | The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title_full_unstemmed | The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title_short | The abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
title_sort | abrupt development of adult-like grid cell firing in the medial entorhinal cortex |
topic | Neuroscience |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3338009/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22557949 http://dx.doi.org/10.3389/fncir.2012.00021 |
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