Authors
\n*G. GINOSAR1, J. ALJADEFF2, Y. BURAK3, H. SOMPOLINSKY3, L. LAS1, N. ULANOVSKY1;
\n1 Weizmann Inst. of Sci., Rehovot, Israel; 2 Dept. of Bioengineering, Imperial Col. London, London, United Kingdom; 3 The Edmond and Lily Safra Ctr. for Brain Sciences, and Racah Inst. of Physics, Jerusalem, Israel<\/p>\n
“Grid cells are neurons in medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) that are activated when the animal passes through multiple locations (\u2018firing-fields\u2019) on the 2D surface that the animal is exploring. These firing-fields are arranged in a hexagonal 2D lattice that spans the entire 2D surface. Although many animals navigate in 3D space, the volumetric 3D firing-pattern of grid cells remains unknown<\/strong><\/span>. Here we recorded MEC neurons in freely-flying bats, and found a variety of spatial cells – including 3D border-cells, 3D head-direction cells, and neurons with multiple 3D firing-fields<\/strong><\/span>. The multi-field neurons displayed an increased inter-field-spacing along the dorso-ventral axis of MEC – as in rodent grid-cells. Many of the multi-field neurons were 3D grid cells – exhibiting a local order in their field arrangement, with fields separated by a characteristic distance; however, they were not organized in a global lattice<\/span><\/strong>. We modeled grid-cells as emerging from pairwise-interactions between fields, which yielded a hexagonal lattice in 2D, but only local order in 3D – thus explaining both 2D and 3D grid-cells within one model.<\/span><\/strong>“<\/p>\n