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Poster
A unified theory for the origin of grid cells through the lens of pattern formation
Ben Sorscher · Gabriel Mel · Surya Ganguli · Samuel Ocko

Thu Dec 12 10:45 AM -- 12:45 PM (PST) @ East Exhibition Hall B + C #182
in Neuroscience and Cognitive Science -- Neural Coding »

Grid cells in the brain fire in strikingly regular hexagonal patterns across space. There are currently two seemingly unrelated frameworks for understanding these patterns. Mechanistic models account for hexagonal firing fields as the result of pattern-forming dynamics in a recurrent neural network with hand-tuned center-surround connectivity. Normative models specify a neural architecture, a learning rule, and a navigational task, and observe that grid-like firing fields emerge due to the constraints of solving this task. Here we provide an analytic theory that unifies the two perspectives by casting the learning dynamics of neural networks trained on navigational tasks as a pattern forming dynamical system. This theory provides insight into the optimal solutions of diverse formulations of the normative task, and shows that symmetries in the representation of space correctly predict the structure of learned firing fields in trained neural networks. Further, our theory proves that a nonnegativity constraint on firing rates induces a symmetry-breaking mechanism which favors hexagonal firing fields. We extend this theory to the case of learning multiple grid maps and demonstrate that optimal solutions consist of a hierarchy of maps with increasing length scales. These results unify previous accounts of grid cell firing and provide a novel framework for predicting the learned representations of recurrent neural networks.

Keywords: Neuroscience and cognitive science · Neural Coding · Algorithms -> Components Analysis (e.g., CCA, ICA, LDA, PCA); Neuroscience and Cognitive Science
[ Paper]  [ Slides] 

Author Information

Ben Sorscher (Stanford University)
Gabriel Mel (Stanford University)
Surya Ganguli (Stanford)
Samuel Ocko (Stanford)

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