Topic summary
Grid cells
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Grid cell.
Properties
Grid cells are neurons that fire when a freely moving animal traverses a set of small regions (firing fields) which are roughly equal in size and arranged in a periodic triangular array that covers the entire available environment. Cells with this firing pattern have been found in all layers of the dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex (dMEC), but cells in different layers tend to differ in other respects. Layer II contains the largest density of pure grid cells, in the sense that they fire equally regardless of the direction in which an animal traverses a grid location. Grid cells from deeper layers are intermingled with conjunctive cells and head direction cells (i.e. in layers III, V and VI there are cells with a grid-like pattern that fire only when the animal is facing a particular direction).