2020/03/25 by Marc W. Howard, Michael E. Hasselmo, Howard, Marc W. +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Mathematics · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Artificial intelligence #Biology #Cognitive Science and Mapping #Cognitive and developmental aspects of mathematical skills #Computer science #Context (archaeology) #Entorhinal cortex #FOS: Biological sciences #Hippocampus #Laplace transform #Mathematical analysis #Mathematics #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Neural coding #Neurons and Cognition (q-bio.NC) #Neurophysiology #Neuroscience #Psychology #Theoretical computer science #q-bio.NC
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2003.11668
arxiv created 2020/03/25 · openalex publication_date 2020/03/25 · arxiv updated 2020/03/27 · openalex created_date 2020/04/03 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Memory for the past makes use of a record of what happened when---a function over past time. Time cells in the hippocampus and temporal context cells in the entorhinal cortex both code for events as a function of past time, but with very different receptive fields. Time cells in the hippocampus can be understood as a compressed estimate of events as a function of the past. Temporal context cells in the entorhinal cortex can be understood as the Laplace transform of that function, respectively. Other functional cell types in the hippocampus and related regions, including border cells, place cells, trajectory coding, splitter cells, can be understood as coding for functions over space or past movements or their Laplace transforms. More abstract quantities, like distance in an abstract conceptual space or numerosity could also be mapped onto populations of neurons coding for the Laplace transform of functions over those variables. Quantitative cognitive models of memory and evidence accumulation can also be specified in this framework allowing constraints from both behavior and neurophysiology. More generally, the computational power of the Laplace domain could be important for efficiently implementing data-independent operators, which could serve as a basis for neural models of a very broad range of cognitive computations.