Experience Dependent Formation of Global Coherent Representation of Environment by Grid Cells and Head Direction Cells

TL;DR

This study investigates how grid and head direction cells develop globally coherent spatial representations through experience, combining theoretical modeling and robotic experiments to understand mammalian navigation.

Contribution

It introduces a theoretical framework linking neural space to physical environment and demonstrates the transition from local to global grid patterns via robotic SLAM experiments.

Findings

Grid firing initially driven by local cues

Experience-dependent self-correction leads to tessellated grid patterns

Head direction cells also exhibit global coherence

Abstract

The grid firing patterns are thought to provide an efficient intrinsic metric capable of supporting universal spatial metric for mammalian spatial navigation in all environments. However, whether spatial representations of grid cells in the entorhinal cortex are determined by local environment cues or form globally coherent patterns remains undetermined. To explore this underlying mechanism, here we proposed a possible theoretical explanation to describe connection between the neural space and the physical environment and transition from a local anchored to a global coherent representation according to relationship between grid phase distance between physical distance in the physical environment, and tested our method based on simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) system on a iRat rodent-sized robot platform in a rat-like maze. Our robotic exploration experiments show that the grid firing firstly is determined by local environment cues, and after self-correction with experience-dependence, the regular, continuous grid firing patterns tessellate the explored space. Head direction (HD) cells also show global patterns in our experimental results. Our results support that grid firing patterns do provide a universal spatial metric for mammalian spatial navigation in complex environments. The results in this study also provide insights into experience-dependent interactions between path integrative calculation of location in the entorhinal cortex and learned associations to the external sensory cues in the hippocampus, which is likely to be critical understanding spatial memory, even episodic memory.