Entorhinal grid cells map the local environment, but their involvement beyond spatial navigation remains elusive. We examined human functional MRI responses during a highly controlled visual tracking task and show that entorhinal cortex exhibited a sixfold rotationally symmetric signal encoding gaze direction. Our results provide evidence for a grid-like entorhinal code for visual space and suggest a more general role of the entorhinal grid system in coding information along continuous dimensions.

We present the German adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang in Technical Report No. C-1. Gainsville: University of Florida, Center for Research in Psychophysiology). A total of 1,003 Words-German translations of the ANEW material-were rated on a total of six dimensions: The classic ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance (as in the ANEW corpus) were extended with additional arousal ratings using a slightly different scale (see BAWL: Võ et al. in Behavior Research Methods 41: 531-538, 2009; Võ, Jacobs, & Conrad in Behavior Research Methods 38: 606-609, 2006), along with ratings of imageability and potency. Measures of several objective psycholinguistic variables (different types of word frequency counts, grammatical class, number of letters, number of syllables, and number of orthographic neighbors) for the words were also added, so as to further facilitate the use of this new database in psycholinguistic research. These norms can be downloaded as supplemental materials with this article.

The priming of concepts has been shown to influence peoples' subsequent actions, often unconsciously. We propose 3 mechanisms (psychological, cultural, and biological) as a unified explanation of such effects. (a) Primed concepts influence holistic representations of situations by parallel constraint satisfaction. (b) The constraints among representations stem from culturally shared affective meanings of concepts acquired in socialization. (c) Patterns of activity in neural populations act as semantic pointers linking symbolic concepts to underlying emotional and sensorimotor representations and thereby causing action. We present 2 computational models of behavioral priming that implement the proposed mechanisms. One is a localist neural network that connects primes with behaviors through central nodes simulating affective meanings. In a series of simulations, where the input is based on empirical data, we show that this model can explain a wide variety of experimental findings related to automatic social behavior. The second, neurocomputational model simulates spiking patterns in populations of biologically realistic neurons. We use this model to demonstrate how the proposed mechanisms can be implemented in the brain. Finally, we discuss how our models integrate previous theoretical accounts of priming phenomena. We also examine the interactions of psychological, cultural, and biological mechanisms in the control of automatic social behavior.