Place and grid cells in the hippocampal formation are commonly thought to support a unified and coherent cognitive map of space. This mapping mechanism faces a challenge when a navigator is placed in a familiar environment that has been deformed from its original shape. Under such circumstances, many transformations could plausibly serve to map a navigator's familiar cognitive map to the deformed space. Previous empirical results indicate that the firing fields of rodent place and grid cells stretch or compress in a manner that approximately matches the environmental deformation, and human spatial memory exhibits similar distortions. These effects have been interpreted as evidence that reshaping a familiar environment elicits an analogously reshaped cognitive map. However, recent work has suggested an alternative explanation, whereby deformation‐induced distortions of the grid code are attributable to a mechanism that dynamically anchors grid fields to the most recently experienced boundary, thus causing history‐dependent shifts in grid phase. This interpretation raises the possibility that human spatial memory will exhibit similar history‐dependent dynamics. To test this prediction, we taught participants the locations of objects in a virtual environment and then probed their memory for these locations in deformed versions of this environment. Across three experiments with variable access to visual and vestibular cues, we observed the predicted pattern, whereby the remembered locations of objects were shifted from trial to trial depending on the boundary of origin of the participant's movement trajectory. These results provide evidence for a dynamic anchoring mechanism that governs both neuronal firing and spatial memory.

中文翻译：

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环境变形动态地改变人类的空间记忆。

海马结构中的位置和网格细胞通常被认为支持统一和连贯的空间认知地图。当导航器被放置在一个熟悉的环境中，而这个环境已经从原来的形状发生变形时，这种映射机制面临着挑战。在这种情况下，许多转换似乎可以用于将导航员熟悉的认知地图映射到变形空间。先前的实证结果表明，啮齿动物位置和网格细胞的发射场以与环境变形近似匹配的方式拉伸或压缩，人类空间记忆表现出类似的扭曲。这些影响被解释为证据表明，重塑熟悉的环境会引发类似重塑的认知地图。然而，最近的工作提出了另一种解释，由此，网格代码的变形引起的失真可归因于一种机制，该机制将网格场动态地锚定到最近经历的边界，从而导致网格相位的历史相关变化。这种解释提出了人类空间记忆将表现出类似的历史依赖动态的可能性。为了测试这个预测，我们教参与者在虚拟环境中物体的位置，然后在这个环境的变形版本中探测他们对这些位置的记忆。在三个对视觉和前庭线索进行可变访问的实验中，我们观察到了预测的模式，即根据参与者运动轨迹的起源边界，对象的记忆位置从一个试验转移到另一个试验。