bats. Bats Place cells were reported in Egyptian fruit bats for the first time in 2007 by Nachum Ulanovsky and his lab. The place cells in bats have a place field in 3D, which is probably due to the bat flying in three dimensions. The place cells in bats can be based on either vision or echolocation, which remapping taking place when bats switch between the two. Bats also have social place cells; this finding was published in Science at the same time as the report of social place cells in rats. Primates Place-related responses have been found in cells of the Japanese macaque and common marmoset, however, whether these are true place cells or spatial view cells is still debated. Spatial view cells respond to locations that are visually explored by eye movement, or the "view of a space", rather than the location of the monkey's body. In the macaque, cells were recorded while the monkey was driving a motorised cab around the experimental room. Additionally, place-related responses have been found macaques while they navigated in a virtual reality. More recently, place cells may have been identified in the hippocampus of freely moving macaques and marmosets. Disturbances to place cell function Effects of alcohol Place cell firing rate decreases dramatically after ethanol exposure, causing reduced spatial sensitivity, which has been hypothesised to be the cause of impairments in spatial procession after alcohol exposure. Alzheimer's disease Problems with spatial memory and navigation are thought to be one of the early indications of Alzheimer's disease. Place cells have been shown to degenerate in Alzheimer's mouse models, which causes such problems with spatial memory in these mice. Furthermore, the place cells in these models have unstable representations of space, and cannot learn stable representations for new environments as well as place cells in healthy mice. The hippocampal theta waves, as well as the gamma waves, that influence place cell firing, for example through phase precession, are also affected. Aging Place field properties, including the rate of firing and spike characteristics such as width and amplitude of the spikes, are largely similar between young and aged rats in the CA1 hippocampal region. However, while the size of place fields in the hippocampal CA3 region remains the same between young and aged rats, average firing rate in this region is higher in aged rats. Young rats exhibit place field plasticity: when they are moving