John O’Keefe
John O’Keefe FRS is Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, a member of the Cell and Developmental Biology department at University College London, and a Principal Research Fellow of the Wellcome Trust. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 2014.
He is interested in the role of the hippocampal formation of the temporal lobe in spatial and episodic memory, and navigation. He discovered that hippocampal pyramidal cells in the rat respond selectively to an animal’s spatial location and proposed that these ‘place cells’, and the hippocampal system more generally, functions as a cognitive map underpinning spatial localization and navigation. In 1993, he discovered phase precession, the coding of location by the timing of place cell spiking relative to the hippocampal theta rhythm, still the best evidence for neural coding by spike timing. With Neil Burgess and Eleanor Maguire, he showed how the cognitive map theory could be used to understand the role of the human hippocampus in navigation and episodic memory.
In current work, his group is studying how the cognitive map supports flexible navigation to a goal in a familiar environment using vector fields. He is also investigating how this vector field model can be used to underpin some aspects of spatial language with particular attention to prepositions and case endings.