Continuous Quasi-Attractors dissolve with too much - or too little - variability.

ABSTRACT: Recent research involving bats flying in long tunnels has confirmed that hippocampal place cells can be active at multiple locations, with considerable variability in place field size and peak rate. With self-organizing recurrent networks, variability implies inhomogeneity in the synaptic weights, impeding the establishment of a continuous manifold of fixed points. Are continuous attractor neural networks still valid models for understanding spatial memory in the hippocampus, given such variability? Here, we ask what are the noise limits, in terms of an experimentally inspired parametrization of the irregularity of a single map, beyond which the notion of continuous attractor is no longer relevant. Through numerical simulations we show that (i) a continuous attractor can be approximated ev

SUBMITTER: Schonsberg F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11635835 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature