How to build a cognitive map: insights from models of the hippocampal formation
This work addresses the problem of bridging neural, computational, and behavioral aspects of cognitive maps for neuroscientists and theorists, but it is incremental as it builds on existing models.
The paper tackles the challenge of understanding how cognitive maps are learned and represented in the brain by synthesizing various models of the hippocampal formation, providing novel interpretations of neural phenomena and extending principles to prefrontal cortex representations.
Learning and interpreting the structure of the environment is an innate feature of biological systems, and is integral to guiding flexible behaviours for evolutionary viability. The concept of a cognitive map has emerged as one of the leading metaphors for these capacities, and unravelling the learning and neural representation of such a map has become a central focus of neuroscience. While experimentalists are providing a detailed picture of the neural substrate of cognitive maps in hippocampus and beyond, theorists have been busy building models to bridge the divide between neurons, computation, and behaviour. These models can account for a variety of known representations and neural phenomena, but often provide a differing understanding of not only the underlying principles of cognitive maps, but also the respective roles of hippocampus and cortex. In this Perspective, we bring many of these models into a common language, distil their underlying principles of constructing cognitive maps, provide novel (re)interpretations for neural phenomena, suggest how the principles can be extended to account for prefrontal cortex representations and, finally, speculate on the role of cognitive maps in higher cognitive capacities.