Topic: quasi-attractive continuous manifold

Recent research involving bats navigating lengthy tunnels has confirmed that hippocampal place cells can be active at multiple locations, with considerable variability in place field size and peak rate. In a recurrent networks, such variability implies quenched disorder in the synaptic weights, impeding the establishment of a continuous manifold of fixed points. If most positions in space are not any longer fixed points, is the popular notion of continuous attractors still relevant? What would be the neural dynamics underlying retrieval of spatial representations?We study the dynamics of recur