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Spatial awareness

In space and time

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 11, page 535 (2010)Cite this article

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Using head-mounted microdrives, the authors of both studies investigated cells in hippocampal area CA1 and in the entorhinal cortex in freely behaving young rats. Cells were categorized according to their specific spatial firing characteristics, allowing the authors to monitor the proportion of different cell types as well as their state of maturation.

In both studies, the authors found that directional cells at postnatal days 15 or 16 (P15/P16) were comparable to those in adult rats in terms of the number of cells and their firing characteristics. At P15/P16 there was also a substantial number of place cells with adult-like firing stability, and this number increased over the subsequent 10 days as their firing characteristics became more adult-like. Grid cells showed only immature firing patterns at P15/P16, and both papers report the first occurrence of more-refined, adult-like firing patterns at P19/P20. Grid cell numbers reached adult levels during the next few days and the cells exhibited adult-like quality of spatial encoding shortly afterwards. These results show that the maturation of the three cell types occurs at different rates during development.

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH PAPERS

  1. Wills, T. J., Cacucci, F., Burgess, N. & O'Keefe, J. Development of the hippocampal cognitive map in preweanling rats. Science 328, 1573–1576 (2010)

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  2. Langston, R. F. et al. Development of the spatial representation system in the rat. Science 328, 1576–1580 (2010)

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

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Authors
  1. Claudia Wiedemann
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Wiedemann, C. In space and time. Nat Rev Neurosci 11, 535 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2891

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn2891

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