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Concept
Place cell
Summary
A place cell is a kind of pyramidal neuron in the hippocampus that becomes active when an animal enters a particular place in its environment, which is known as the place field. Place cells are thought to act collectively as a cognitive representation of a specific location in space, known as a cognitive map. Place cells work with other types of neurons in the hippocampus and surrounding regions to perform this kind of spatial processing. They have been found in a variety of animals, including rodents, bats, monkeys and humans.
Place-cell firing patterns are often determined by stimuli in the environment such as visual landmarks, and olfactory and vestibular stimuli. Place cells have the ability to suddenly change their firing pattern from one pattern to another, a phenomenon known as remapping. This remapping may occur in either some of the place cells or in all place cells at once. It may be caused by a number of changes, such as in the odor of the environment.
Place cells are thought to play an important role in episodic memory. They contain information about the spatial context a memory took place in. And they seem to perform consolidation by exhibiting replay – the reactivation of the place cells involved in a certain experience at a much faster timescale. Place cells show alterations with age and disease, such as Alzheimer's disease, which may be involved in a decrease of memory function.
The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was awarded to John O'Keefe for the discovery of place cells, and to Edvard and May-Britt Moser for the discovery of grid cells.
Place cells were first discovered by John O'Keefe and Jonathan Dostrovsky in 1971 in rats' hippocampuses. They noticed that rats with impairments in their hippocampus performed poorly in spatial tasks, and thus hypothesised that this area must hold some kind of spatial representation of the environment. To test this hypothesis, they developed chronic electrode implants, with which they could record the activity of individual cells extracellularly in the hippocampus.
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