Grid Cell Percolation

TL;DR

This paper explores how percolation theory explains the emergence of regular firing patterns in grid cells, providing insights into their role in spatial organization and matching experimental neurophysiological data.

Contribution

It introduces a novel percolation-based statistical framework to understand grid cell firing regularity, aligning theoretical predictions with biological observations.

Findings

Percolation phenomena occur within biologically plausible parameters.

Grid cell firing regularity can be explained by percolation theory.

Supports the role of grid cells in organizing hippocampal spatial maps.

Abstract

Grid cells play a principal role in enabling mammalian cognitive representations of ambient environments. The key property of these cells -- the regular arrangement of their firing fields -- is commonly viewed as means for establishing spatial scales or encoding specific locations. However, using grid cells' spiking outputs for deducing spatial orderliness proves to be a strenuous task, due to fairly irregular activation patterns triggered by the animal's sporadic visits to the grid fields. The following discussion addresses statistical mechanisms enabling emergent regularity of grid cell firing activity, from the perspective of percolation theory. In particular, it is shown that the range of neurophysiological parameters required for spiking percolation phenomena matches experimental data, which points at biological viability of the percolation approach and casts a new light on the role of grid cells in organizing the hippocampal map.