Perspectives on 2014 Nobel Prize

In celebration of the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, this issue of Hippocampus includes a collection of commentaries from a broad range of perspectives on the significance of position coding neurons in the hippocampal region. From the perspective of this student of hippocampal physiology, it is argued that place cells and grid cells reflect the outcome of experiments that strongly select the information available and correspondingly observe singular "trigger features" of these neurons. Notably, however, in more naturalistic situations where multiple dimensions of information are available, hippocampal neurons have mixed selectivity wherein population-firing patterns reflect the organization of many features of experience. Thus, while discoveries on position coding were major breakthroughs in penetrating the hippocampal code, future studies exploring more complex behaviors hold the promise of revealing the full contribution of the hippocampal region to cognition and memory.