Entorhinal velocity signals reflect environmental geometry

Summary

The entorhinal cortex contains neurons that represent self-location, including grid cells that fire in periodic locations and velocity signals that encode running speed and head direction. While the size and shape of the environment influences grid patterns, whether entorhinal velocity signals are equally influenced or provide a universal metric for self-motion across environments remains unknown. Here, we report that speed cells rescale after changes to the size and shape of the environment. Moreover, head direction cells re-organize in an experience-dependent manner to align with the axis of environmental change. A knockout mouse model allows a dissociation of the coordination between cell types, with grid and speed, but not head direction, cells responding in concert to environmental change. These results point to malleability in the coding features of multiple entorhinal cell types and have implications for which cell types contribute to the velocity signal used by computational models of grid cells.