Robotic and neuronal simulation of the hippocampus and rat navigation

Abstract

Abstract The hippocampus has been implicated as the neural basis of mammalian navigation ever since the discovery of spatially tuned neurons (place cells) in the hippocampus of freely moving rats (O’ Keefe & Dostrovsky 1971). The fact that each place cell (PC) tends to fire at a high rate only when the rat is in a particular portion of its environment, independently of local sensory cues such as the odour of the floor covering, prompted the idea that they provide the neural representation of the location of the rat within its environment (O’ Keefe & Nadel 1978). It has recently been shown that the firing of PCs does indeed contain sufficient information to localize the rat (Wilson & McNaughton 1993). Lesions of the rat’ s hippocampus impair its navigational ability, specifically in tasks requiring an internal representation of space such as returning to an unmarked goal location from novel starting positions (see, for example, Morris et al. 1982; Jarrard 1993).