Using Grid Cells for Navigation

By Daniel Bush, C. Barry, D. Manson, Neil Burgess. Neuron, 2015

298 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Summary Mammals are able to navigate to hidden goal locations by direct routes that may traverse previously unvisited terrain. Empirical evidence suggests that this “vector navigation” relies on an internal representation of space provided by the hippocampal formation. The periodic spatial firing patterns of grid cells in the hippocampal formation offer a compact combinatorial code for location within large-scale space. Here, we consider the computational problem of how to determine the vector between start and goal locations encoded by the firing of grid cells when this vector may be much longer than the largest grid scale. First, we present an algorithmic solution to the problem, inspired by the Fourier shift theorem. Second, we describe several potential neural network implementations of this solution that combine efficiency of search and biological plausibility. Finally, we discuss the empirical predictions of these implementations and their relationship to the anatomy and electrophysiology of the hippocampal formation.

Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/53074c3600b808f6daf95e867f52a6d5b7b7d0a2

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In Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience

In Cognitive Neuroscience

Citations in the corpus

Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, background): “Positional decoding in cognitive spaces might benefit from the combination of multiple scales of representation analog to navigable space (26, 27).”
The Role of Hippocampal Replay in Memory and Planning (2018, background): “Several groups [72,116,119] have proposed, based on theoretical analyses, that replay in entorhinal grid cells provides the means to calculate goal-directed vectors.”
A map of abstract relational knowledge in the human hippocampal–entorhinal cortex (2017, background): “The entorhinal cortex is noted for the presence of grid cells (Hafting et al., 2005), which may provide a metric for measuring distances in physical space (Bush et al., 2015; Stemmler et al., 2015), allowing vector navigation.”
The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Animal Minds (2017, methodology): “Neuroscientists have developed detailed mathematical models describing how place cells, grid cells, and other such cells support navigation (e.g. Bush et al. 2015; Cheng and Frank, 2011; McNaughton et al. 2006; Solstad et al. 2006).”