a ‘zooming’ mechanism, which provides a relatively coarse resolution of a large environment but an increasingly finer spatial resolution in smaller environments, with more neurons devoted to a given area of space, increased co-firing among cells in each theta cycle and increased overall firing in the population86. An attractive property of this arrangement is that sub-theta cycle time lags also allow place and grid cells to continue to represent the same positions and distances at different speeds of locomotion80,83,86 because the oscillation frequency of place and grid cells increases in proportion with the animal’s velocity80,85 and the time lags within the theta cycle remain largely independent of firing rate changes86.
