Topic: navigational decisions

The circuit mechanisms that transform sensory input into the observed firing patterns in the hippocampus are unclear. Like primates, birds almost exclusively depend on vision to navigate. However, birds primarily direct gaze using head saccades, rather than eye saccades, and gaze can therefore be readily measured during free movement. We leveraged these features to ask how visual input during navigational decisions is encoded by the hippocampus. We developed a system to estimate gaze in freely moving birds, and designed a task to behaviorally dissociate physical location (“place”) from viewed

Many behaviors demand a balance between exploitation, which requires reliability, and exploration, which involves flexibility. In cortical circuits, much work has emphasized how attractor dynamics generate reliable behavior through the convergence of a network to specialized activity patterns for specific decisions and actions1. Other work has emphasized how cortical activity exhibits variability across trials of a behavior, which could in principle support flexibility in actions2. Here, through multi-area calcium imaging and recurrent neural network models, we propose that cortical activity f