Topic: anterior hindbrain

To successfully navigate their environment, animals may generate an internal, abstract and stable representation of the environment that can be updated based on sensory cues, such as visual landmarks or vestibular feedback, or internally generated motor commands. In mammals, neurons that fire when the animal faces a particular direction in the world reference frame have been recorded in mammillary bodies and entorhinal cortex. The heading direction can be read out using a weighted sum of the activation of those cells. This dynamics is well described by a “ring attractor” model: the network has