Experience-dependent rescaling of entorhinal grids

Caswell Barry, Robin Hayman, Neil Burgess and Kathryn J Jeffery
Nature Neuroscience - 10, 682 - 684 (2007)
Published online: 7 May 2007; | doi:10.1038/nn1905

The firing pattern of entorhinal 'grid cells' is thought to provide an intrinsic metric for space. We report a strong experience-dependent environmental influence: the spatial scales of the grids (which are aligned and have fixed relative sizes within each animal) vary parametrically with changes to a familiar environment's size and shape. Thus grid scale reflects an interaction between intrinsic, path-integrative calculation of location and learned associations to the external environment.

Fulltext: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n6/pdf/nn1905.pdf