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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, discovered more than a decade ago [5], are neurons in the brain of mammals that fire when the animal is located near certain specific points in its familiar terrain. Intriguingly, these points form, for a single cell, a…
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 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 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…
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…
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…
Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) of the mammalian brain exhibit a strikingly regular hexagonal firing field over space. These cells are learned after birth and are thought to support spatial navigation but also more abstract…
The grid firing patterns are thought to provide an efficient intrinsic metric capable of supporting universal spatial metric for mammalian spatial navigation in all environments. However, whether spatial representations of grid cells in the…
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 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…
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…
Decades of research on the neural code underlying spatial navigation have revealed a diverse set of neural response properties. The Entorhinal Cortex (EC) of the mammalian brain contains a rich set of spatial correlates, including grid…
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…
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…
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…
Questions about information encoded by the brain demand statistical frameworks for inferring relationships between neural firing and features of the world. The landmark discovery of grid cells demonstrates that neurons can represent spatial…
In both neuroscience and artificial intelligence, popular functional frameworks and neural network formulations operate by making use of extrinsic error measurements and global learning algorithms. Through a set of conjectures based on…
We propose a mechanism enabling the appearance of border cells -- neurons firing at the boundaries of the navigated enclosures. The approach is based on the recent discovery of discrete complex analysis on a triangular lattice, which allows…
Neurons in the brain are often finely tuned for specific task variables. Moreover, such disentangled representations are highly sought after in machine learning. Here we mathematically prove that simple biological constraints on neurons,…