Universal conditions for exact path integration in neural systems

Animals are capable of navigation even in the absence of prominent landmark cues. This behavioral demonstration of path integration is supported by the discovery of place cells and other neurons that show path-invariant response properties even in the dark. That is, under suitable conditions, the activity of these neurons depends primarily on the spatial location of the animal regardless of which trajectory it followed to reach that position. Although many models of path integration have been proposed, no known single theoretical framework can formally accommodate their diverse computational mechanisms. Here we derive a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a general class of systems that performs exact path integration. These conditions include multiplicative modulation by velocity inputs and a path-invariance condition that limits the structure of connections in the underlying neural network. In particular, for a linear system to satisfy the path-invariance condition, the effective synaptic weight matrices under different velocities must commute. Our theory subsumes several existing exact path integration models as special cases. We use entorhinal grid cells as an example to demonstrate that our framework can provide useful guidance for finding unexpected solutions to the path integration problem. This framework may help constrain future experimental and modeling studies pertaining to a broad class of neural integration systems.