A Visually Driven Hippocampal Place Cell Model

Abstract

The firing of place cells in the rodent hippocampus is partly under the control of visual landmarks in the environment (O’Keefe and Conway, 1978). Most place cell models incorporating “visual” input assume noise-free bearing and/or distance information from idealized point objects (e.g., Burgess, Recce, and O’Keefe, 1994; Touretzky and Redish, 1996), rather than attempting to extract landmark information from real-world scenes. This leaves open the question of what kind of visual information is necessary for the hippocampal system to maintain place fields that are stable across trials yet sensitive to landmark position.