Navigating with Landmarks: Computing Goal Locations From Place Codes

Abstract

Abstract Landmark-based navigation is a rich domain for exploring issues of visual and spatial cognition. At the behavioral level, there is a wealth of data on how animals use landmarks to locate food or to return to their nests. At the neurophysiological level, hippocampal pyramidal cells called place cells have been discovered that fire when the animal is in a certain location in its environment [12, 20, 24]. These cells change their firing patterns in response to displacement or removal of prominent landmarks [21]. Cells in the subicular complex [34], the thalamus [19, 33], and the parietal cortex [4], whose firing rates are correlated with the animal’s heading (head direction cells) have also been found to be controlled in part by visual cues. In this chapter, we describe a theory of navigation in rodents that is constrained by both behavioral and neurophysiological data. The theory is embodied in a computer model called CRAWL, allowing us to replicate various experiments in the rodent-navigation literature and make predictions about place-cell responses in novel situations. Some of this work has been previously reported in [37, 40, 41].Portions of the model have also been implemented on a mobile robot [38, 40].