This excerpt note is about place cell activity model from the Arleo A. et al. 2000 paper.<\/p>\n
Arleo, Angelo, and Wulfram Gerstner. “Spatial cognition and neuro-mimetic navigation: a model of hippocampal place cell activity<\/strong><\/a>.” Biological cybernetics 83, no. 3 (2000): 287-299.<\/p>\n This paper presents a computational model<\/strong> of the hippocampus that relies on the idea of sensor-fusion to drive place cell activity<\/strong>.<\/p>\n External cues<\/strong> and internal self-generated information<\/strong> are integrated for establishing and maintaining hippocampal place fields. Receptive fields are learned by extracting spatio-temporal properties of the environment.<\/p>\n Incoming visual stimuli are interpreted by means of neurons that only respond to combinations of specific visual patterns. The activity of these neurons implicitly represents properties like agent-landmark distance and egocentric orientation to visual cues.<\/p>\n In a further step, the activity of several of these neurons is combined to yield place cell activity.<\/p>\n Unsupervised Hebbian learning<\/strong> is used to build the hippocampal neural structure incrementally.<\/p>\n In addition to visual input we also consider idiothetic information.<\/p>\n An extra-hippocampal path integrator<\/strong> drives Gaussian-tuned neurons<\/strong> modelling internal movement-related stimuli.<\/p>\n During the agent-environment interaction, synapses between visually driven cells and path-integration neurons are established by means of Hebbian learning<\/strong>. This allows us to correlate allothetic and idiothetic cues<\/strong> to drive place cell activity.<\/p>\n The proposed model results in a neural spatial representation<\/strong> consisting of a population of localized overlapping place fields (modelling the activity of CA1 and CA3 pyramidal cells). To interpret the ensemble place cell activity<\/strong> as spatial location we apply a population vector coding<\/strong> scheme (Georgopoulos et al. 1986; Wilson and McNaughton 1993).<\/p>\n The head-direction cells<\/strong>, neurons whose activity is tuned to the orientation of the rat’s head in the azimuthal plane. Each head-direction cell fires maximally when the rat’s head is oriented in a specific direction, regardless of the orientation of the head with respect to the body, and of the rat’s spatial location. Thus, the ensemble activity of head-direction cells<\/strong> provides a neural allocentric compass<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Head-direction cells have been observed in the hippocampal formation and in particular in the postsubiculum (Taube et al. 1990), in the anterior thalamic nuclei (Blair and Sharp 1995; Knierim et al. 1995), and in the lateral mammillary nuclei (Leonhard et al. 1996).<\/p>\n References<\/p>\n Georgopoulos, Apostolos P., Andrew B. Schwartz, and Ronald E. Kettner. “Neuronal population coding of movement direction<\/a>.” Science (1986): 1416-1419.<\/p>\n Wilson, Matthew A., and Bruce L. McNaughton. “Dynamics of the hippocampal ensemble code for space<\/a>.” Science 261, no. 5124 (1993): 1055-1059.<\/p>\n Taube, Jeffrey S., Robert U. Muller, and James B. Ranck. “Head-direction cells recorded from the postsubiculum in freely moving rats. I. Description and quantitative analysis<\/a>.” Journal of Neuroscience 10, no. 2 (1990): 420-435.<\/p>\n Taube, Jeffrey S., Robert U. Muller, and James B. Ranck. “Head-direction cells recorded from the postsubiculum in freely moving rats. II. Effects of environmental manipulations<\/a>.” Journal of Neuroscience 10, no. 2 (1990): 436-447.<\/p>\n Blair, Hugh T., and Patricia E. Sharp. “Anticipatory head direction signals in anterior thalamus: evidence for a thalamocortical circuit that integrates angular head motion to compute head direction<\/a>.” Journal of Neuroscience 15, no. 9 (1995): 6260-6270.<\/p>\n