Related papers: On the optimality of grid cells
Grid cells in the brain respond when an animal occupies a periodic lattice of "grid fields" during spatial navigation. The grid scale varies along the dorso-ventral axis of the entorhinal cortex. We propose that the grid system minimizes…
Since their Nobel Prize winning discovery in 2005, grid cells have been studied extensively by neuroscientists. Their multi-scale periodic firing rates tiling the environment as the animal moves around has been shown as critical for path…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex fire when animals that are exploring a certain region of space occupy the vertices of a triangular grid that spans the environment. Different neurons feature triangular grids that differ in their…
Representing and reasoning about physical space is fundamental to animal survival, and the mammalian lineage expresses a wealth of specialized neural representations that encode space. Grid cells, whose discovery earned a Nobel prize, are a…
About a decade ago grid cells were discovered in the medial entorhinal cortex of rat. Their peculiar firing patterns, which correlate with periodic locations in the environment, led to early hypothesis that grid cells may provide some form…
Encoding the distance between locations in space is essential for accurate navigation. Grid cells, a functional class of neurons in medial entorhinal cortex, are believed to support this computation. However, existing theories of how…
Grid cells enable the brain to model the physical space of the world and navigate effectively via path integration, updating self-position using information from self-movement. Recent proposals suggest that the brain might use similar…
Grid cells in medial entorhinal cortex are believed to play a key role in path integration. However, the relation between path integration and the grid-like arrangement of their firing field remains unclear. We provide theoretical evidence…
Work on deep learning-based models of grid cells suggests that grid cells generically and robustly arise from optimizing networks to path integrate, i.e., track one's spatial position by integrating self-velocity signals. In previous work,…
Grid cells are believed to play an important role in both spatial and non-spatial cognition tasks. A recent study observed the emergence of grid cells in an LSTM for path integration. The connection between biological and artificial neural…
This paper investigates the conformal isometry hypothesis as a potential explanation for the hexagonal periodic patterns in grid cell response maps. We posit that grid cell activities form a high-dimensional vector in neural space, encoding…
Grid cells play a principal role in enabling mammalian cognitive representations of ambient environments. The key property of these cells -- the regular arrangement of their firing fields -- is commonly viewed as means for establishing…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex are believed to establish their regular, spatially correlated firing patterns by path integration of the animal's motion. Mechanisms for path integration, e.g. in attractor network models, predict…
Place cells in the hippocampus are active when an animal visits a certain location (referred to as a place field) within an environment. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) respond at multiple locations, with firing fields that…
To afford flexible behaviour, the brain must build internal representations that mirror the structure of variables in the external world. For example, 2D space obeys rules: the same set of actions combine in the same way everywhere (step…
For 20 years the beautiful structure in the grid cell code has presented an attractive puzzle: what computation do these representations subserve, and why does it manifest so curiously in neurons. The first question quickly attracted an…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex, together with head direction, place, speed and border cells, are major contributors to the organization of spatial representations in the brain. In this work we introduce a novel theoretical and…
The spatial responses of many of the cells recorded in all layers of rodent medial entorhinal cortex (mEC) show a triangular grid pattern, and once established might be based in part on path-integration mechanisms. Grid axes are tightly…
Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex of mammalian brains exhibit striking hexagon grid firing patterns in their response maps as the animal (e.g., a rat) navigates in a 2D open environment. In this paper, we study the emergence of the…
Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex and place cells in the hippocampus together support spatial navigation. The two regions are reciprocally connected, and there is a chicken-and-egg problem for how both arise and reinforce each…