The mechanisms behind grid cell changes When grid cells were first discovered in the brain, the grids were considered to have rigid coordinates beyond the borders of the testing environments. However, recent findings suggest that the grid cell pattern can be altered easily by changing the space of the enclosure. But how? Krupic et al. discovered that local changes in the geometry of the environment shifted individual neighboring grid fields, while more distant fields remained unchanged. Thus, changes to the grid structure are localized. Stable landmarks continue to exert an effect on most grid cells, whereas the ones close to changed borders are modified. Science, this issue p. 1143 Individual grid fields in the brain shift by different amounts with changes in the geometry of the enclosure. Grid cells are neurons active in multiple fields arranged in a hexagonal lattice and are thought to represent the “universal metric for space.” However, they become nonhomogeneously distorted in polarized enclosures, which challenges this view. We found that local changes to the configuration of the enclosure induce individual grid fields to shift in a manner inversely related to their distance from the reconfigured boundary. The grid remained primarily anchored to the unchanged stable walls and showed a nonuniform rescaling. Shifts in simultaneously recorded colocalized grid fields were strongly correlated, which suggests that the readout of the animal’s position might still be intact. Similar field shifts were also observed in place and boundary cells—albeit of greater magnitude and more pronounced closer to the reconfigured boundary—which suggests that there is no simple one-to-one relationship between these three different cell types.

中文翻译：

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海马认知图的局部转变

网格细胞变化背后的机制当网格细胞首次在大脑中发现时，网格被认为具有超出测试环境边界的刚性坐标。然而，最近的研究结果表明，可以通过改变外壳的空间来轻松改变网格单元图案。但如何呢？克鲁皮克等人。发现环境几何形状的局部变化改变了各个相邻网格场，而更远的场保持不变。因此，网格结构的变化是局部的。稳定的地标继续对大多数网格单元产生影响，而靠近变化边界的网格单元则被修改。科学，本期第 14 页。1143 大脑中的各个网格场随着外壳几何形状的变化而变化不同的量。网格细胞是在六角形网格中排列的多个领域中活跃的神经元，被认为代表“空间的通用度量”。然而，它们在极化外壳中变得不均匀扭曲，这挑战了这一观点。我们发现，外壳配置的局部变化会导致各个网格场以与其距重新配置边界的距离成反比的方式发生移动。网格仍然主要固定在未改变的稳定墙上，并显示出不均匀的重新缩放。同时记录的共定位网格场的变化密切相关，这表明动物位置的读数可能仍然完好无损。在适当位置和边界细胞中也观察到类似的场变化——尽管幅度更大并且更接近重新配置的边界更明显——这表明这三种不同的细胞类型之间不存在简单的一对一关系。