Learning an efficient place cell map from grid cells using non-negative sparse coding

Abstract

AbstractExperimental studies of grid cells in the Medial Entorhinal Cortex (MEC) have shown that they are selective to an array of spatial locations in the environment that form a hexagonal grid. However, in a small environment, place cells in the hippocampus are only selective to a single-location of the environment while granule cells in the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus have multiple discrete firing locations, but lack spatial periodicity. Given the anatomical connection from MEC to the hippocampus, previous feedforward models of grid-to-place have been proposed. Here, we propose a unified learning model that can describe the spatial tuning properties of both hippocampal place cells an..