 John O'Keefe, who later shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his discovery that place cells help form a "map" of the body's position in space, co-discovered phase precession with Michael Recce in 1993.Pyramidal cells in the hippocampus called place cells play a significant role in self-location during movement over short distances.As a rat moves along a path, individual place cells fire action potentials at an increased rate at particular positions along the path, termed "place fields".