Day 13 of 150 Spatial Difficulty 7/10
Place cells in the hippocampus encode where you are
Quick answer
Place cells in the hippocampus encode where you are. Today's question (Place cells and the hippocampus) asks about a finding from O'Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. in 1971. The correct option is Hippocampus — full explanation, primary source, and glossary cross-links below.
Today's question
Place cells — neurons that fire selectively when an animal is in a specific location — are concentrated in which brain region?
Reveal the answer and explanation
Correct: C — Hippocampus
O'Keefe & Dostrovsky (1971) recorded from the rat hippocampus and discovered cells that fired selectively when the animal was in a specific location in its environment. The discovery was extended decades later by grid cells in entorhinal cortex (Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser & Moser, 2005). The 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine was shared by John O'Keefe with May-Britt Moser and Edvard Moser, grounding Tolman's cognitive maps in neural code. Damage to the hippocampus produces severe spatial-disorientation syndromes.
About the source
O'Keefe, J., & Dostrovsky, J. (1971). The hippocampus as a spatial map: Preliminary evidence from unit activity in the freely-moving rat. Brain Research, 34(1), 171–175.
Every Cognition Bible question cites a primary source — a paper, book chapter, or monograph that exists, that we can point to on Google Scholar, and whose finding the question accurately summarizes. No fabricated authority strings, no name-drops without paper-level grounding.
More from the Cognition Bible
Done with today's question? Play the FOKIQ Daily — six puzzles across six cognitive domains, free, every day.