Entorhinal Cortex - Neuron Information Processing

Neuron Information Processing

In 2005, it was discovered that entorhinal cortex contains a neural map of the spatial environment in rats.

Neurons in the lateral entorhinal cortex exhibit little spatial selectivity, whereas neurons of the medial entorhinal cortex (MEA), exhibit multiple "place fields" that are arranged in an hexagonal pattern, and are, therefore, called "grid cells". These fields and spacing between fields increase from the dorso-lateral MEA to the ventro-medial MEA.

Single-unit recording of neurons in humans playing video games find path cells in the EC, the activity of which indicates whether a person is taking a clockwise or counterclockwise path. Such EC "direction" path cells show this directional activity irrespective of the location of where a person experiences themselves, which contrasts them to place cells in the hippocampus, which are activated by specific locations.

EC neurons process general information such as directional activity in the environment, which contrasts to that of the hippocampal neurons, which usually encode information about specific places. This suggests that EC encodes general properties about current contexts that are then used by hippocampus to create unique representations from combinations of these properties.