Overview

What are grid cells

Grid cells are a type of cells found in some mammalian species that have very regular spatial firing fields. When these animals forage in experimental arenas, grid cells are active only in certain places and the locations where they are active form a hexagonal lattice. More information can be found in [MOSER2007] or in [HAFTING2005].

What does gridcells do

gridcells is a simple Python library that aims to provide an open source code repository related to analysis of grid cell related experiments and simulation of models of grid cells.

Download

gridcells can be downloaded from https://github.com/lsolanka/gridcells.

Dependencies

There are a number of dependencies needed for the python version:
  • setuptools (>= 3.6)
  • SWIG (ideally >= 3.0; earlier versions not tested)
  • numpy (>= 1.8)
  • scipy (>= 0.13.3)
  • matplotlib (>= 1.3.1)

For Linux, simply install these using the package manager.For Mac OS the easiest way is probably to use homebrew. This package has not been tested on Windows but if you manage to install the dependencies there should be no problems.

Installation

After installing the dependencies, run:

python setup.py install

Note

Currently, installing with pip through the Python Package Index has some difficulties with the dependency on numpy. Thus it is advisable to have numpy installed beforehand.

License

gridcells is distributed under the GPL license. See LICENSE.txt in the root of the source directory.

References

[MOSER2007]Edvard Moser and May-Britt Moser (2007). Grid cells. Scholarpedia, 2(7):3394.
[HAFTING2005]Hafting, T. et al., 2005. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature, 436(7052), pp.801–806.