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Place cells have been shown to degenerate in Alzheimer's mouse models, which causes such problems with spatial memory in these mice. [80] Furthermore, the place cells in these models have unstable representations of space, [81] and cannot learn stable representations for new environments as well as place cells in healthy mice. [82]
In one study, single-cell recordings were taken from electrodes implanted in a rat's hippocampus, and it was found that certain neurons responded strongly only when the rat was in certain locations. These cells are called place cells, and collections of these cells can be considered to be mental maps. Individual place cells do not only respond ...
The phenomenon has mostly been observed in the hippocampus, a brain region associated with memory and spacial navigation. Specifically, the cells that exhibit this behavior are place cells, characterized by reliably increasing their activity when the animal is in a certain location in space. During navigation, the place cells fire in a sequence ...
Together these cells form a network that serves as spatial memory. The first of such cells discovered in the 1970s were the place cells, which led to the idea of the hippocampus acting to give a neural representation of the environment in a cognitive map. [56]
Epileptic patients, especially those who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy, often experience deficits in memory encoding and retrieval, developing anterograde and retrograde amnesia. [8] At times, if a seizure specifically affects the hippocampus, the individual afflicted can encode memory; however, that memory rapidly extinguishes. [8]
In addition to place cells and grid cells, two further classes of spatial cell have since been identified in the hippocampal formation: head direction cells and boundary cells. As with the memory theory, there is now almost universal agreement that the hippocampal formation plays an important role in spatial coding, but the details are widely ...
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View of left entorhinal cortex (red) from beneath the brain, with front of brain at top. Artist's rendering. The superficial layers – layers II and III – of EC project to the dentate gyrus and hippocampus: Layer II projects primarily to dentate gyrus and hippocampal region CA3; layer III projects primarily to hippocampal region CA1 and the subiculum.