FLICKR, EUSKALANATOFirst recognized in rats, humans may also owe their sense of direction in part to grid cells—neurons that fire in a triangular pattern and help keep track of navigational cues—according to a study published yesterday (August 4) in Nature Neuroscience. Recording the neuronal activities of people asked to locate invisible objects in a virtual environment, researchers at Drexel University observed grid-like firing in two regions of the brain, providing the most concrete evidence yet for the existence of grid cell activity in humans.
Investigators from Norway’s Centre for the Biology of Memory first discovered grid cells in rats in 2005. Contrasting with place cells, which fire action potentials when an animal passes through a specific space, the researchers found that these newly identified neurons fired in a triangular grid pattern, all at once, when an animal moves about in open space. In 2010, University College London’s Neil Burgess and his colleagues reported the first hints of grid cells in the human memory network based on functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, which identified neural activity in humans that supported the role of grid cells in spatial cognition and autobiographical memory.
“Although fMRI signals have been found consistent with the firing of populations of grid cells with aligned grids, ...
