In an investigation of spatial cognition, neuroscientist Edvard Moser and colleagues examined how mammals maintain internal maps of physical environments. The team recorded the electrical activity of specialized neurons—known as grid cells—in the medial entorhinal cortex of rodents navigating open enclosures. The firing fields of individual grid cells formed remarkably regular, periodic triangular lattices spanning the entire available area, closely matching mathematical models of hexagonal close-packing. This spatial periodicity indicated to the researchers that the entorhinal cortex generates an intrinsic, metric coordinate system capable of computing distance and trajectory independently of external visual landmarks.
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Verbal·Craft and Structure·Text Structure and Purpose
easyWhich choice best states the function of the underlined sentence in the text as a whole?
A
To offer empirical data describing the geometric firing pattern that supports the researchers’ deduction about the brain’s spatial mapping mechanism
B
To present a surprising inconsistency in the neural recordings that prompted Moser and his team to revise their experimental setup
C
To outline an alternative mathematical hypothesis that contradicts the researchers’ view of entorhinal navigation
D
To describe the specific laboratory environment constructed to test rodent navigational speed