Topic: Flexible navigation

Flexible navigation requires animals to form accurate and persistent internal representations of continuous spatial variables. Such representations—e.g., those carried by head direction (HD), grid, and place cells—can guide behavior even in the absence of localizing sensory cues. Theories of mammalian HD cells propose that such representations can be realized in a special class of networks that maintain a localized bump of activity via structured recurrent connectivity, and that shift this bump of activity via angular velocity input. These so-called ring attractor networks have historically re