Scientists reveals brain's spatial processing mechanisms by Angela Mohan on February 16, 2021 at 3:30 PM Place cells in the hippocampus encode spatial information using interchangeably two distinct information processing mechanisms referred to as a rate code and a phase code, analogue to the number and spatial arrangement of bars in bar codes, as per the research team led by Sebastien Royer at KIST Brain Science Institute (BSI), in collaboration with a research team at New York University (NYU). In addition, the research team found that parallel neural circuits and information processing mechanisms are used depending on the complexity of the landmarks along the path.