Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 14 (NIPS 2001)
Neil Burgess, Tom Hartley
We present a model of the firing of place and head-direction cells in rat hippocampus. The model can predict the response of individual cells and populations to parametric manipulations of both geomet(cid:173) ric (e.g. O'Keefe & Burgess, 1996) and orientational (Fenton et aI., 2000a) cues, extending a previous geometric model (Hartley et al., 2000). It provides a functional description of how these cells' spatial responses are derived from the rat's environment and makes easily testable quantitative predictions. Consideration of the phenomenon of remapping (Muller & Kubie, 1987; Bostock et aI., 1991) indicates that the model may also be consistent with non(cid:173) parametric changes in firing, and provides constraints for its future development.