Time Makes Space: Emergence of Place Fields in Networks Encoding Temporally Continuous Sensory Experiences.

ABSTRACT: The vertebrate hippocampus is believed to use recurrent connectivity in area CA3 to support episodic memory recall from partial cues. This brain area also contains place cells, whose location-selective firing fields implement maps supporting spatial memory. Here we show that place cells emerge in networks trained to remember temporally continuous sensory episodes. We model CA3 as a recurrent autoencoder that recalls and reconstructs sensory experiences from noisy and partially occluded observations by agents traversing simulated arenas. The agents move in realistic trajectories modeled from rodents and environments are modeled as continuously varying, high-dimensional, sensory experience maps (spatially smoothed Gaussian random fields). Training our autoencoder to accurately pattern-comple

SUBMITTER: Wang Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11343115 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature