Place cells, navigational accuracy, and the human hippocampus

The hippocampal formation in both rats and humans is involved in spatial navigation. In the rat, cells coding for places, directions, and speed of movement have been recorded from the hippocampus proper and/or the neighbouring subicular complex. Place fields of a group of the hippocampal pyramidal c...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences 1998-08, Vol.353 (1373), p.1333-1340
Main Authors: O'Keefe, John, Burgess, Neil, Donnett, James G., Jeffery, Kathryn J., Maguire, Eleanor A.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Anatomy
Animals
Brain Mapping
Electrodes
Functional Imaging
Hippocampus
Hippocampus - cytology
Hippocampus - physiology
Humans
Locomotion - physiology
Mental stimulation
Movement - physiology
Navigation
Neural Network
Neurons
Neurons - physiology
Perceptual localization
Pyramidal cells
Rat
Rats
Spatial Behavior - physiology
Spatial Navigation
Spatial Representation and Attention
Tetrodes
Virtual Reality
Waveforms
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Summary:The hippocampal formation in both rats and humans is involved in spatial navigation. In the rat, cells coding for places, directions, and speed of movement have been recorded from the hippocampus proper and/or the neighbouring subicular complex. Place fields of a group of the hippocampal pyramidal cells cover the surface of an environment but do not appear to do so in any systematic fashion. That is, there is no topographical relation between the anatomical location of the cells within the hippocampus and the place fields of these cells in an environment. Recent work shows that place cells are responding to the summation of two or more Gaussian curves, each of which is fixed at a given distance to two or more walls in the environment. The walls themselves are probably identified by their allocentric direction relative to the rat and this information may be provided by the head direction cells. The right human hippocampus retains its role in spatial mapping as demonstrated by its activation during accurate navigation in imagined and virtual reality environments. In addition, it may have taken on wider memory functions, perhaps by the incorporation of a linear time tag which allows for the storage of the times of visits to particular locations. This extended system would serve as the basis for a spatio-temporal event or episodic memory system.
ISSN:0962-8436
1471-2970
DOI:10.1098/rstb.1998.0287