This excerpt note is about place cell activity model from the Arleo A. et al. 2000 paper.

Arleo, Angelo, and Wulfram Gerstner. “Spatial cognition and neuro-mimetic navigation: a model of hippocampal place cell activity.” Biological cybernetics 83, no. 3 (2000): 287-299.

This paper presents a computational model of the hippocampus that relies on the idea of sensor-fusion to drive place cell activity.

External cues and internal self-generated information are integrated for establishing and maintaining hippocampal place fields. Receptive fields are learned by extracting spatio-temporal properties of the environment.

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.

In a further step, the activity of several of these neurons is combined to yield place cell activity.

Unsupervised Hebbian learning is used to build the hippocampal neural structure incrementally.

In addition to visual input we also consider idiothetic information.

An extra-hippocampal path integrator drives Gaussian-tuned neurons modelling internal movement-related stimuli.

During the agent-environment interaction, synapses between visually driven cells and path-integration neurons are established by means of Hebbian learning. This allows us to correlate allothetic and idiothetic cues to drive place cell activity.

The proposed model results in a neural spatial representation 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 as spatial location we apply a population vector coding scheme (Georgopoulos et al. 1986; Wilson and McNaughton 1993).

The head-direction cells, 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 provides a neural allocentric compass.

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).

References

Georgopoulos, Apostolos P., Andrew B. Schwartz, and Ronald E. Kettner. “Neuronal population coding of movement direction.” Science (1986): 1416-1419.

Wilson, Matthew A., and Bruce L. McNaughton. “Dynamics of the hippocampal ensemble code for space.” Science 261, no. 5124 (1993): 1055-1059.

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.” Journal of Neuroscience 10, no. 2 (1990): 420-435.

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.” Journal of Neuroscience 10, no. 2 (1990): 436-447.

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.” Journal of Neuroscience 15, no. 9 (1995): 6260-6270.

Knierim, James J., Hemant S. Kudrimoti, and Bruce L. McNaughton. “Place cells, head direction cells, and the learning of landmark stability.” Journal of Neuroscience 15, no. 3 (1995): 1648-1659.

Leonhard, C. L., R. W. Stackman, and J. S. Taube. “Head direction cells recorded from the lateral mammillary nuclei in rats.” In Soc Neurosci Abstr, vol. 22, p. 1873. 1996.