Hippocampal place cells map terrain geometry independently of behavior
Roddy M. Grieves, Éléonore Duvelle, Jeffrey S. Taube · 2026
Read Hippocampal place cells map terrain geometry independently of behavior by Roddy M. Grieves, Éléonore Duvelle, Jeffrey S. Taube (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13232613.txt.
Description
Roddy M Grieves and colleagues ask in 2026 whether the brain maps of rats hug the ground surface when land rises and falls. Place cells in the hippocampus fire at set spots and anchor the mental map of a space. Rats foraged over flat and ridged floors while the team recorded those cells.
Firing zones stretched along the terrain contours, like paint following the hills rather than the open air above them. That stretching ran against the direction the rats preferred to move, which rules out a simple movement echo. A third of the cells repeated their firing zone on every ridge in the set. A boundary-based model reproduced the pattern, tying map shape to the lay of the land.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Roddy M. Grieves, Éléonore Duvelle, Jeffrey S. Taube |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 94 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |