Environmental Barriers Disrupt Grid-like Representations in Humans during Navigation

Environmental barriers fundamentally shape our behavior and conceptualization of space [1-5]. Evidence from rodents suggests that, in contrast to an open-field environment, where grid cells exhibit firing patterns with a 6-fold rotational symmetry [5,6], barriers within the field abolish the 6-fold symmetry and fragment the grid firing fields into compartmentalized repeating submaps [5]. These results suggest that barriers may exert their influence on the cognitive map through organization of the metric representation of space provided by entorhinal neurons. We directly tested this hypothesis in humans, combining functional MRI with a virtual navigation paradigm in which we manipulated the local barrier structure. When participants performed a fixed-route foraging task in an open field, the functional MRI signal in right entorhinal cortex exhibited a 6-fold periodic modulation by movement direction associated with conjunctive grid cell firing [7]. However, when environments were compartmentalized by barriers, the grid-like 6-fold spatial metric was abolished. Instead, a 4-fold modulation of the entorhinal signal was observed, consistent with a vectorized organization of spatial metrics predicted by rodent models of navigation [5]. Collectively, these results provide mechanistic insight into why barriers compartmentalize our cognitive map, indicating that boundaries exert a powerful influence on the way environments are represented in human entorhinal cortex. Given that our daily environments are rarely wide open and are often segmented by barriers (e.g., the buildings of our home city), our findings have implications for applying models of cognitive mapping based on grid-like metrics [8] to naturalistic circumstances.