Medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) grid cells contribute to navigation by encoding information about an animal’s current position and self-motion. Ouchi and Fujisawa now report the discovery of MEC grid cells that predict an animal’s future position.

The authors recorded from rat MEC neurons as the animals participated in a task requiring them to move back and forth along linear trajectories between pairs of reward ports within an open field. They revealed a subset of MEC neurons — which they termed ‘predictive grid cells’ — that exhibited grid fields (firing fields arranged as a hexagonal grid across the environment) that represented their future projected position along the current trajectory. This predictive grid coding was preserved across other behavioural tasks, including random foraging.