Week 5: The map, and what it was really for
Representing structure you are not currently sensing — and the 2016 result suggesting the machinery was never specifically spatial.
Tolman (1948) and then place cells (O’Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971) gave us a spatial system with identifiable parts, and for decades that looked like the end of the story.
Constantinescu, O’Reilly and Behrens (2016) found the same hexagonal grid-like signal while people navigated a space of concepts, in entorhinal and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, stable across sessions a week apart. If one mechanism organises relational structure generally, space is the instance we happened to find first because it is the one we can see.
Whittington and colleagues (2020) is the model that tries to unify the two, for anyone who wants the formal treatment.
Teaching team
- Tuyet Nabarro — lecturer