Grid-like hexadirectional modulation of human entorhinal theta oscillations

Abstract

The entorhinal cortex plays a critical role in allowing organisms to navigate and represent spatial memories using grid-like representations. Given the importance of spatial processing for everyday life, we examined the patterns of neuronal oscillations in the entorhinal cortex, which are thought to underlie grid cells, in humans using intracranial recordings from neurosurgical patients as they navigated in virtual reality. We show that the power of entorhinal theta oscillations shows a distinctive six-way symmetric directional modulation, suggesting they correlate with grid representations, and that this signal correlates with spatial memory performance. Our findings thus show that the human entorhinal grid network is associated with theta oscillations and indicate that it is possible to measure properties of grid-like neural representations by recording oscillations.

Document Details

Document Type
Pub Defense Publication
Publication Date
Oct 03, 2018
Source ID
10.1073/pnas.1805007115

Entities

People

  • Joel M Stein
  • Jonathan Miller
  • Joshua Jacobs
  • Shachar Maidenbaum

Organizations

  • Columbia University
  • National Institute of Mental Health
  • University of Pennsylvania

Tags

Fields of Study

  • Biology

Readers

  • Atmospheric Science / Meteorology, specifically Wind Wave Turbulence.
  • Nanoscale Plasmonic Nanotechnology
  • Vision Science/Vision Psychology/Cognitive Neuroscience.