The idea that the rat hippocampus stores a map of space is based on the existence of "place cells" that show "location-specific" firing. The discharge of place cells is confined with remarkable precision to a cell-specific part of the environment called the cell's "firing field." We demonstrate here that firing is not nearly as reliable in the time domain as in the positional domain. Discharge ...

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The spatial mapping theory of hippocampal function proposes that the rat hippocampus is specialized for navigational computations, computations that allow the animal to solve difficult spatial problems. In this paper, we review evidence obtained by recording place cells and other "spatially tuned" cells from freely moving rats. Our main conclusion is that the nature of the signals carried by th...

We investigated how humans encode large-scale spatial environments using a virtual taxi game. We hypothesized that if 2 connected neighborhoods are explored jointly, people will form a single integrated spatial representation of the town. However, if the neighborhoods are first learned separately and later observed to be connected, people will form separate spatial representations; this should ...

It has been hypothesized that one of the functions of the hippocampus is to enable the learning of relationships between different stimuli experienced in the environment. These relationships might be spatial ("the bathroom is about 5m down the hall from the bedroom") or temporal ("the coffee is ready about 3 min after the button was pressed"). Critically, these spatial and temporal relationship...

A model of place-cell firing is presented that makes quantitative predictions about specific place cells' spatial receptive fields following changes to the rat's environment. A place cell's firing rate is modeled as a function of the rat's location by the thresholded sum of the firing rates of a number of putative cortical inputs. These inputs are tuned to respond whenever an environmental boun...

Single neuron recording studies have demonstrated the existence of spatial view neurons which encode information about the spatial location at which a primate is looking in the environment. These neurons are able to maintain their firing even in the absence of visual input. The standard neuronal network approach to model networks with memory that represent continuous spaces is that of continuou...

Currently, there is a lack of general-purpose, in-place learning engines that incrementally learn multiple tasks, to develop “soft” multi-task-shared invariances in the intermediate internal representation while a developmental robot interacts with its environment. In-place learning is a biologically inspired concept, rooted in the genomic equivalence principle, meaning that each neuron is resp...

How does the brain encode spatial structure? One way is through hippocampal neurons called place cells, which become associated to convex regions of space known as their receptive fields: each place cell fires at a high rate precisely when the animal is in the receptive field. The firing patterns of multiple place cells form what is known as a convex neural code. How can we tell when a neural c...

Given a rectangular m × n matrix stored as a two-dimensional array, we want to transpose it in place andmeasure the cost by the number of memory writes and the number of auxiliary cells used. We propose a transposition algorithm with optimal complexity O(mn) using only min(m, n) auxiliary memory cells. © 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.