Topic: cognitive maps

Daniel Levenstein discusses spontaneous activity in the hippocampus and cortex, especially during sleep, and its relationship to learning, memory and navigation. He explains how AI models can help investigate these dynamics, alongside questions about model systems, cognitive maps and the relationship between neuroscience experiments and theory.

Cognitive maps have been proposed as an essential relational structure for human memory and thought (Tolman, 1948; Constantinescu et al., 2016). In this format, remembered entities are embedded in space and their relationships are encoded via concrete angles and Euclidean distances. Although much of higher human cognition may be spatial, cognitive maps are not the only possible relational structure. With a behavioral experiment we aim to challenge the extent of the cognitive map hypothesis and to investigate when and how humans represent knowledge via the relational structure of cognitive grap

Cognitive maps are abstract internal representations of the external world that facilitate planning and efficient navigation. How the brain learns such maps from variable sensory experience remains elusive. Previous models either relied on discrete environments [1], linear embeddings of continuous states [2], or generative models trained by predicting sensory input [3]. However, the world is neither discrete nor linear, and the brain presumably does not learn a generative model of its sensory inputs. So, how can the brain learn a map and use it to plan strategically? In this work, we develop

During navigation, animals dynamically create rich representations of the environment, forming personalized cognitive maps. The hippocampal area CA1 features spatial cells that adapt based on behavior and internal states. Computational models have usually obtained spatial tuning by training a deep recurrent network for solving path integration, over numerous epochs, using backpropagation [1, 2, 3]. However, such methods do not closely align with the real-time local learning used by animals. Additionally, the formed spatial maps are solely oriented towards solving a specific task, and fail to c