About

The Nobel-prize winning research from the Moser group identified the existence of grid cells – cells that fire in hexagonal lattices across the available spatial environment – within the medial entorhinal cortex. Since these cells were discovered in 2005, the group has discovered a number of functional elements of the entorhinal space circuit. It is not until recently, however, that technological and computational advances have allowed space coding to be understood at the level of neural populations consisting of many thousands of neurons with dedicated functions. A turn to neural populations is a must if we are to understand how space-coding neurons give rise to behaviour.

Aim

To decipher the mechanisms underlying neural network computation in the brain’s cortex, with particular emphasis on the dynamic representation of space and memory in large neural populations in entorhinal cortex and hippocampus of the mammalian brain.

Key Research Questions

1. How do neural networks in entorhinal cortex and hippocampus keep track of our position in space? How do grid cells, direction cells and place cells contribute to a dynamic collective representation of self-location?

2. With increasing evidence suggesting that grid cells operate on a low dimensional manifold with the characteristics of a continuous attractor network, how is such dynamics implemented through the functional wiring of the local circuit?

3. What are the algorithms enabling spatial coding in the entorhinal-hippocampal system, and how are the codes read out and transformed across populations in the system? How are grid cells discretized to modules, how are modules of the circuit coordinated, and how do specific types of modular organization benefit the formation of episodic memories?

4. How do entorhinal-hippocampal networks keep track of time and order, and how does such tracking give rise to memories of experience?

These and other questions are addressed in the ongoing KILONEURONS project supported by the European Research Council, and they are part of the commitment to the Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex.

Tools & Methods

We implement and develop tools for large-scale high-spatiotemporal-resolution recording and intervention in neural populations of the rodent cortex during behaviour.

• Latest-generation high-site-count silicon Neuropixels probes for large-scale high-temporal-resolution neural activity recording in freely moving rats and mice
• Portable two-photon miniscopes (MINI2P) for high-resolution optical imaging of neuronal activity in freely moving mice
• Advanced computationally-inspired statistical analysis of high-dimensional neural population data obtained with Neuropixels and two-photon miniscopes