Place Sequence Learning for Navigation

A model of the hippocampus as a cognitive map inspired by the models of Burgess et al and Jensen et al is pro posed Simulations show that the resulting navigation behavior is as e cient as the behavior exhibited by previous models However the archi tecture of the proposed model and the mechanisms governing the tem poral characteristics of the neurons in the model are more realistic In particular the proposed model assigns distinct and speci c roles to the entorhinal cortex the dentate gyrus and the hippocampal CA region In essence the dentate gyrus could act as a short term memory that maintains the representation of a sequence of recently visited places It could then force the corresponding CA place cells to re and to learn the spatial relationships between places through a Hebbian rule This topological representation could then serve as a basis for predicting places ahead of the animal and drive goal cells i e cells that represent the direction to the goal as proposed by Burgess et al