YouTube video by Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience

Gittercellene skulle bare fortelle hjernen hvor den var. Nå viser det seg at de også peker mot hvor den vil.

Grid cells were supposed to tell the brain only where it was. Now it turns out they also point towards where it wants to go.

Efficient navigation requires prioritizing information from behaviorally relevant locations. In rats, such selective sampling may arise from theta-paced sweeps in grid and place cell populations, whic...

Theta sweeps have been mired in controversy for decades, but the emerging consensus view suggests that they function in attention and goal direction.

YouTube video by Kavli Institute for Systems Neuroscience

Gittercellene skulle bare fortelle hjernen hvor den var. Nå viser det seg at de også peker mot hvor den vil.

Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

A systems-level understanding of cortical computation requires insight into how neural codes are transformed across distinct brain circuits. In the mammalian cortex, one of the few systems where such ...

A systems-level understanding of cortical computation requires insight into how neural codes are transformed across distinct brain circuits. In the mammalian cortex, one of the few systems where such ...