Size Matters: How Scaling Affects the Interaction between Grid and Border Cells

It has been suggested that border-to-grid cells' associations minimize the accumulated grid cells'  error when rodents explore enclosures. Thus, the border-grid interaction for error minimization is a suitable scenario to study the effects of border cell scaling within the context of spatial  representation. In this study, two questions were computationally addressed: 1. Does border cells' scale play a role in maintaining the regularity of grid cells' firing fields? 2. What are the underlying mechanisms of grid-border associations relative to the scales of both grid and border cells. The results suggest that for optimal contribution to grid cells' error minimization, border cells should express smaller firing fields relative to those of the associated grid cells, which is consistent with the hypothesis of border cells functioning as spatial anchoring signals.