Remapping in a recurrent neural network model of navigation and context inference

Neurons in navigational brain regions provide information about position, orientation, and speed relative to environmental landmarks. These cells also change their firing patterns ('remap') in response to changing contextual factors such as environmental cues, task conditions, and behavioral states, which influence neural activity throughout the brain. How can navigational circuits preserve their local computations while responding to global context changes? To investigate this question, we trained recurrent neural network models to track position in simple environments while at the same time reporting transiently-cued context changes. We show that these combined task constraints (navigation and context inference) produce activity patterns that are qualitatively similar to population-wide remapping in the entorhinal cortex, a navigational brain region. Furthermore, the models identify a solution that generalizes to more complex navigation and inference tasks. We thus provide a simple, general, and experimentally-grounded model of remapping as one neural circuit performing both navigation and context inference.

Automated summary

Researchers found that neurons in navigational brain regions can change their firing patterns in response to changing contextual factors while preserving local computations. By training neural network models to track position and report transiently-cued context changes in simple environments, they showed that the activity patterns are similar to population-wide remapping in the navigational brain region. Furthermore, the models' solution generalizes to more complex navigation and inference tasks.