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Credit: Dr. Steven Poulter and Dr. Colin Lever
The existence of GPS-like brain cells, which can store maps of the places we've been, like our kitchen or holiday destination, was already widely known, but this discovery shows there is also a type of brain cell sensitive to the distance and direction of objects that can store their locations on these maps.
The research, led by Dr Steven Poulter and Dr Colin Lever from Durham University, and co-directed by Dr Thomas Wills from the University of Central London (UCL), found that Vector Trace cells can track how far we have travelled and remember where things are, which are added to our memory map of the places we have been.