| Citation | Professor O'Keefe is an internationally respected neuroscientist who has made major contributions to our understanding of the neural bases of spatial perception and memory. In a series of technically innovative and conceptually ingenious experiments on a cortical region, the hippocampus, he has shown that single neurons code for an animal's location in an environment and, further, participate in the memory for that location. These and other findings led to the novel idea that this part of the brain provides a cognitive map of the environment, summarised in his now classic book with Nadel. This theory, controversial at first, has now achieved the status of the dominant framework within which much hippocampal research in conducted. |