No Representation Of Allocentric Space Has Been Found In The

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situation (O'Keefe, 1983). Indeed, this situation does not require the rat to have a concept of absolute space; it may depend on associations between cues and responses which are provided by the maze structure itself. However, O'Keefe & Nadel (1978) identified spatial behaviours which they argued would require the existence of an allocentric map: detection of changes within the environment; navigation to the goal from a different starting location; and perhaps most importantly detour behaviour, which required the adaptation of novel behaviour to find the goal after the usual route had been blocked in some way.

Further support was added by Collett et al (1986). They trained gerbils to find seeds located at a central point between two landmarks, and upon moving these landmarks further apart rather than searching at a point equidistant, which would suggest an egocentric view of the environment, they searched at the same distance from each of the landmarks. This would suggest that ...

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(1990) suggested that these place cells were in fact perceptual cells in the post-subiculum tuned to a "local view": what the rat sees at a particular place where it must make a critical decision about which way to turn to reach a location, because the cell firing was also dependent on the direction the rat was looking in the environment. One limitation of this view is that this directional specificity was much less common in an open unstructured environment.

Muller et al (1991) challenged both the allocentric map and local view models. They found that as well as "place cells" there was apparent in the brain "region cells" which were active in broad and importantly functional regions ...

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