Event:

Studies of the hippocampal place system have previously mostly taken
place in controlled laboratory environments in which animals were
confined to single enclosures having simple geometry. However, the
natural world is much more complex: it has multiple compartments or no
compartments at all; it has complex surface topography such as hills,
valleys, crevices, cliffs etc; it can be very small (a burrow) or very
large (the ocean), and many animals, including our marine ancestors, can
move freely in all three dimensions. This talk will explore the
computational challenges faced by encoding complex space, and describe
some of the studies that have begun to explore how mammalian brains deal
with this complexity.