Kavli Affiliate: Edvard Moser, May-Britt Moser
| Authors: Laurenz Muessig, Fabio Ribeiro Rodrigues, Tale Bjerknes, Ben Towse, Caswell Barry, Neil Burgess, Edvard I Moser, May-Britt Moser, Francesca Cacucci and Thomas J Wills
| Summary:
Boundaries to movement form a specific class of landmark information used for navigation. Boundary Vector Cells (BVCs) are neurons which encode an animal’s location with respect to boundaries. Here we report the first objective characterisation of the prevalence and spatial tuning of BVCs in the Subiculum. Manipulations of boundary geometry reveal two novel features of BVC firing. Firstly, BVC directional tunings are aligned with environment walls in squares, but are uniformly distributed in circles, demonstrating that environmental geometry influences BVC receptive field tunings. Secondly, inserted barriers produce both excitatory and inhibitory responses, suggesting a role for inhibition in subiculum boundary representations. During post-natal development, subiculum BVCs mature slowly, in contrast to the earlier maturation of boundary-responsive cells in upstream Entorhinal Cortex. However, both Subiculum and Entorhinal BVC directional tunings are influenced by boundary geometry as early as tested, suggesting this is an inherent feature of the hippocampal representation of space.