Topic: cognitive map

Much is known about the neural representations of current environmental location and direction within the hippocampal formation, but use of such a “cognitive map” requires the online representation of desired locations and how to get there, and the neural basis for this function has been more elusive. I will discuss how “theta sweeps” of place and grid cell firing encode the current location (at early phases of each theta cycle) while, at later phases, sampling around the forward direction during exploration and indicating the direction to desired locations during goal-directed navigation. I w

The hippocampus is thought to build a cognitive map that supports navigation, memory, and planning, but what defines such a map and how it is used remain debated. In this talk, I will present computational models in which hippocampal-like representations emerge in recurrent neural networks trained to predict sequences of sensory observations. While spatially tuned units reliably arise, they are not sufficient to form a cognitive map. Instead, map-like representations emerge when recurrent dynamics support multi-step prediction, yielding a population-level encoding of environmental geometry. On

My talk will consist of three subtopics. The brain remembers episodes not in isolation but with their contextual relationships, such as spatial or temporal proximity. This is an essential feature of the brain’s memory, but the underlying mechanism is yet to be explored. Cell assemblies, or engrams, may provide neural representations for such relationships. First, I will show a class of associative memory models that encode and retrieve multiple memory contents linked by an arbitrary graph structure through experience and demonstrate the crucial role of the balance between two inhibitory subnet

The hippocampus creates a cognitive map of the world to optimize predictions and guide behavior, with the dorsal and ventral hippocampus believed to play unique roles in this process. To understand how such representations evolve with learning and are updated with new experience, we used 2-photon calcium imaging to track the same dCA1 or vCA1 neurons across days as mice learned to associate odor stimuli with different outcomes. During reward (sucrose) associative learning, we find that, initially, odor cues elicited robust responses in dCA1, whereas in vCA1 encoding of odor identity was reduce

Central place foraging insects like the honeybee (Apis mellifera) are the masters of visual navigation of the insect world: They are able to reliably return to their nest under a wide range of visual conditions after only a few learning flights, (a feat so far unrivalled by any artificial system). Furthermore, they perform complex navigational tasks, such as ‘computing’ novel shortcuts between previously known but unrelated food sources, supporting claims about the existence of a ‘cognitive map’ in honeybees. This raises the question which internal representations of the world (and the animal’

The hippocampus is presumably involved in spatial navigation, the formation of long-term memories in mammals, and the construction of a cognitive map of space using a prominent feature – place cells [1] (PCs). It is unclear how PCs’ neural codes are related to memory: turnover of neural representations could be involved in learning, while codes’ stability may support long-term storage and retrieval of memories [2]. In this work, we focus on the analysis of one-photon (1P) calcium imaging data recorded from mouse CA1 during free foraging in a two-dimensional arena with the help of a miniature

Our understanding of the hippocampus has been framed by two landmark discoveries: the discovery by Scoville and Milner that hippocampal damage causes profound and persistent amnesia and the discovery by O’Keefe and Dostrovsky of hippocampal place cells in rodents. However, it has been unclear to what extent spatial representations are present in the primate brain and how to reconcile these representations with the known mnemonic function of this region. I will discuss a series of experiments that have examined neural activity in the hippocampus in monkeys performing behavioral tasks including