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Title: Grid Cell Percolation
Abstract

Grid cells play a principal role in enabling cognitive representations of ambient environments. The key property of these cells—the regular arrangement of their firing fields—is commonly viewed as a means for establishing spatial scales or encoding specific locations. However, using grid cells’ spiking outputs for deducing geometric orderliness proves to be a strenuous task due to fairly irregular activation patterns triggered by the animal’s sporadic visits to the grid fields. This article addresses statistical mechanisms enabling emergent regularity of grid cell firing activity from the perspective of percolation theory. Using percolation phenomena for modeling the effect of the rat’s moves through the lattices of firing fields sheds new light on the mechanisms of spatial information processing, spatial learning, path integration, and establishing spatial metrics. It is also shown that physiological parameters required for spiking percolation match the experimental range, including the characteristic 2/3 ratio between the grid fields’ size and the grid spacing, pointing at a biological viability of the approach.

 
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Award ID(s):
1901338
PAR ID:
10554726
Author(s) / Creator(s):
Editor(s):
Sharpee, T
Publisher / Repository:
Neural Computation
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Neural Computation
Volume:
35
Issue:
10
ISSN:
0899-7667
Page Range / eLocation ID:
1609 to 1626
Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
grid cells, place cells, percolation, phase transition, spatial learning
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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