How the brain encodes the spatial position of others ?
SOCIAL PLACE CELLS For social animals, such as bats and rats, tracking the position of a conspecific is important for social interactions such as observational learning. Much previous research has described how hippocampal place cells encode one’s own spatial location; however, the neuronal basis for encoding the position of another is unknown. Two new papers(Danjo et al., Omer et al.) identify so-called social place cells : neurons in the dorsal CA1 region (dCA1) of the hippocampus in bats and in rats that encode the position of an observed conspecific.