Mammalian Navigation, Neural Models and Biorobotics

Abstract

W ithin their home range, rodents and other mammals navigate by updating their position through (inter nal) signals derived from locom otion and by using landmark place associations.Single unit recordings in freely moving rats show that motion cues and external, mainly visual information act on place and head direction cells in the hippocampus and functionally related brain areas.Currently, a num ber of partially converg ing and diverging neural network models aim at representing the neural system that controls rodent navigation.It is argued that the attempt to build self-steering robots on the basis of behavioura l and neurophysiological results from rodents and of computer simulations of these results is premature, given the lack of consensus in the literature on mammalian navigation.