Grid and Nongrid Cells in Medial Entorhinal Cortex Represent Spatial Location and Environmental Features with Complementary Coding Schemes

The medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) has been identified as a hub for spatial information processing by the discovery of grid, border, and head-direction cells. Here we find that in addition to these well-characterized classes, nearly all of the remaining two-thirds of mEC cells can be categorized as spatially selective. We refer to these cells as nongrid spatial cells and confirmed that their spatial firing patterns were unrelated to running speed and highly reproducible within the same environment. However, in response to manipulations of environmental features, such as box shape or box color, nongrid spatial cells completely reorganized their spatial firing patterns. At the same time, grid cells retained their spatial alignment and predominantly responded with redistributed firing rates across their grid fields. Thus, mEC contains a joint representation of both spatial and environmental feature content, with specialized cell types showing different types of integrated coding of multimodal information. •Nearly all principal cells in mEC exhibit spatial coding properties•Nongrid spatial cell firing is consistent within the same environment•Grid cell firing rates redistribute across fields in response to box manipulations•Nongrid spatial cells respond to box manipulations with reorganized spatial firing Diehl et al. describe how grid and nongrid spatial cells can represent environmental features, such as shape or color. Grid cells retain stable spatial representations but show rate differences across fields, while nongrid spatial cells profoundly alter their spatial firing.