Event:

In many functionally distinct regions of the brain, populations of neurons form maps of sensory and cognitive spaces. I will recall evidence from the early visual system that the brain minimizes the neural resources required to reach the computational accuracy required by an animal’s behavioral needs. I will then apply this principle of efficiency to the "sense of place" -- i.e., the representation, by the "grid cell" system in the entorhinal cortex, of an animal’s physical location in terms of a set of lattices of different spatial scales. The theory predicts many architectural features of the grid system (e.g. the fixed ratio between grid scales) which match recent experimental data . An animal’s location is also thought to be encoded in the "place cell" system of the hippocampus. If time permits, I will describe an alternative proposal, rooted in the redundancy and coordination between small- and large-scale place cells, which suggests that the place system is in fact intended to support value-driven navigation.