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Science 305 (5688): 1258-1264

Copyright © 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science

Spatial Representation in the Entorhinal Cortex

Marianne Fyhn,1 Sturla Molden,1 Menno P. Witter,1,2 Edvard I. Moser,1* May-Britt Moser1

Abstract: As the interface between hippocampus and neocortex, the entorhinal cortex is likely to play a pivotal role in memory. To determine how information is represented in this area, we measured spatial modulation of neural activity in layers of medial entorhinal cortex projecting to the hippocampus. Close to the postrhinal-entorhinal border, entorhinal neurons had stable and discrete multipeaked place fields, predicting the rat's location as accurately as place cells in the hippocampus. Precise positional modulation was not observed more ventromedially in the entorhinal cortex or upstream in the postrhinal cortex, suggesting that sensory input is transformed into durable allocentric spatial representations internally in the dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex.

1 Centre for the Biology of Memory, Medical-Technical Research Centre, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 7489 Trondheim, Norway.
2 Research Institute Neurosciences, Department of Anatomy, VU University Medical Center, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: edvard.moser{at}cbm.ntnu.no

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