Paper Info
Title
Navigate the Unknown: Implications of Grid-Cells "Mental Travel" in Vicarious Trial and Error.
Abstract
Rodents are able to navigate within dynamic environments by constantly adapting to their surroundings. Hippocampal place-cells encode the animals current location and fire in sequences during path planning events. Place- cells receive excitatory inputs from grid-cells whose metric system constitute a powerful mechanism for vector based navigation for both known and unexplored locations. However, neither the purpose or the behavioral consequences of such mechanism are fully understood. During early exploration of a maze with multiple discrimination points, rodents typically manifest a conflict-like behavior consisting of alternating head movements from one arm of the maze to the other be-foremaking a choice, a behavior which is called vicarious trial and error (VTE). Here, we suggest that VTE is modulated by the learning process between spatial- and reward-tuned neuronal populations. We present a hippocampal model of place- and grid-cells for both space representation and mental travel that we used to control a robot solving a foraging task. We show that place-cells are able to represent the agents current location, whereas grid-cells encode the robots movement in space and project their activity over unexplored paths. Our results suggest a tight interaction between spatial and reward related neuronal activity in defining VTE behavior.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1007/978-3-319-42417-0_23
BIOMIMETIC AND BIOHYBRID SYSTEMS, LIVING MACHINES 2016
Keywords
Field
DocType
Biomimetics,Navigation,Grid cells,Mental travel,VTE
Motion planning,ENCODE,Neuroscience,Trial and error,Grid cell,Premovement neuronal activity,Computer science,Robot,Hippocampal formation,Foraging
Conference
Volume
ISSN
Citations 
9793
0302-9743
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
2
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Diogo Santos Pata182.69
Riccardo Zucca27011.03
Paul F. M. J. Verschure3677116.64