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Extensive studies in rodents show that place cells in the hippocampus have firing patterns that are highly correlated with the animal's location in the environment and are organized in layers of increasing field sizes or scales along its dorsoventral axis. In this study, we use a spatial cognition model to show that different field sizes could be exploited to adapt the place cell representation to different environments according to their size and complexity. Specifically, we provide an in-depth analysis of how to distribute place cell fields according to the obstacles in cluttered environments to optimize learning time and path optimality during goal-oriented spatial navigation tasks. The analysis uses a reinforcement learning (RL) model that assumes that place cells allow encoding the state. While previous studies have suggested exploiting different field sizes to represent areas requiring different spatial resolutions, our work analyzes specific distributions that adapt the representation to the environment, activating larger fields in open areas and smaller fields near goals and subgoals (e.g., obstacle corners). In addition to assessing how the multi-scale representation may be exploited in spatial navigation tasks, our analysis and results suggest place cell representations that can impact the robotics field by reducing the total number of cells for path planning without compromising the quality of the paths learned.
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The ventral hippocampus is involved in multi‐goal obstacle‐rich spatial navigation
Abstract A large body of evidence shows that the hippocampus is necessary for successful spatial navigation. Various studies have shown anatomical and functional differences between the dorsal (DHC) and ventral (VHC) portions of this structure. The DHC is primarily involved in spatial navigation and contains cells with small place fields. The VHC is primarily involved in context and emotional encoding contains cells with large place fields and receives major projections from the medial prefrontal cortex. In the past, spatial navigation experiments have used relatively simple tasks that may not have required a strong coordination along the dorsoventral hippocampal axis. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that the DHC and VHC may be critical for goal‐directed navigation in obstacle‐rich environments. We used a learning task in which animals memorize the location of a set of rewarded feeders, and recall these locations in the presence of small or large obstacles. We report that bilateral DHC or VHC inactivation impaired spatial navigation in both large and small obstacle conditions. Importantly, this impairment did not result from a deficit in the spatial memory for the set of feeders (i.e., recognition of the goal locations) because DHC or VHC inactivation did not affect recall performance when there was no obstacle on the maze. We also show that the behavioral performance of the animals was correlated with several measures of maze complexity and that these correlations were significantly affected by inactivation only in the large object condition. These results suggest that as the complexity of the environment increases, both DHC and VHC are required for spatial navigation.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1703340
- PAR ID:
- 10079034
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Hippocampus
- Volume:
- 28
- Issue:
- 12
- ISSN:
- 1050-9631
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- p. 853-866
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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