Research Project (2003-2007)

Slowness and sparseness lead to place, head-direction, and spatial-view cells

Mathias Franzius, Henning Sprekeler, and Laurenz Wiskott


If a rat runs around in a cage with textured walls and floor, its visual input varyies quickly while its position varies relatively slowly. If the visual environment is rich enough, there is a one-to-one mapping between the visual input and the position. Thus, it should be possible to use the slowness principle to extract from the quickly varying visual input the more slowly varying position of the rat. Applying slow feature analysis to the visual input of a simulated rat indeed extracts spatial information resembling grid cells. Applying a linear transformation maximizing sparseness, see project page Sparseness yields place cells from grid cells, then leads to units similar to place cells. With the same network but with different movement statistics one can similarly get units resembling head-direction cells and spatial-view cells.

architecture overview (70 kB)

Figure 1: Overview of the simulation setup and network architecture. Left: Top view of the simulated rat (red arrow) in the textured cage. Bottom: Visual input of the rat at the current position. Right: Architecture of the hierarchical SFA-network for learning grid-like units and subsequently place-like units.

simulated
place cells (79 kB) experimental place cells (27 kB)

Figure 2: Place cell receptive fields. Left: Place fields emerging from the network simulation driven only by visual input like that in figure 1. Right: Place fields from an experiment (Wilson & McNaughton), arranged such that they optimally match the simulation results.


Relevant Publications:

Black colored reference are the principal ones. Gray colored references are listed for the sake of completeness only. They contain little additional information. .ps-files are optimized for printing; .pdf-files are optimized for viewing at the computer.

  1. Wiskott, L., Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Appleby, P.A. (13. September 2009).
    Self-organization of place cells with slowness, sparseness, and neurogenesis
    Proc. 41st European Brain and Behaviour Society, EBBS, Rhodes Island, Greece, September 13 - 18, special issue of Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience, doi: 10.3389/conf.neuro.08.2009.09.062 (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  2. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (1. November 2007).
    Slowness and sparseness lead to place-, head direction-, and spatial-view cells
    Proc. 3rd Annual Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Conference, San Diego, CA, USA, November 1-2, ed. Suzanna Becker et al., p. III-8 (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  3. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (31. August 2007).
    Slowness and Sparseness Lead to Place, Head-Direction, and Spatial-View Cells.
    PLoS Computational Biology 3(8):e166, doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.0030166.
    (bibtex, abstract.html, paper, paper.pdf)

  4. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (26. April 2007).
    Unsupervised Learning of Place Cells, Head-Direction Cells, and Spatial-View Cells with Slow Feature Analysis on Quasi-Natural Videos.
    Cognitive Sciences EPrint Archive (CogPrints) 5492, http://cogprints.org/5492/.
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  5. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (29. March 2007).
    Unsupervised learning of place cells and head direction cells with slow feature analysis.
    Proc. 7th Meeting of the German Neuroscience Society - 31st Göttingen Neurobiology Conference, Göttingen, March 29 - April 1, TS19-1C (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  6. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (19. March 2007).
    Unsupervised learning of visually driven place cells in the hippocampus.
    Kognitionsforschung 2007, Beiträge zur 8. Jahrestagung der Gesellschaft für Kognitionswissenschaft (KogWis07), Saarbrücken, March 19-21, eds. C. Frings, A. Mecklinger, B. Opitz, M. Pospeschill, D. Wentura, H.D. Zimmer, publ. Shaker Verlag, Aachen, p. 60 (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  7. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (1. October 2006).
    Slowness leads to place cells.
    Proc. 2nd Bernstein Symposium for Computational Neuroscience 2006, Berlin, October 1-3, publ. Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience (BCCN) Berlin, p. 45, (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  8. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (16. July 2006).
    Slowness leads to place cells.
    Proc. 15th Annual Computational Neuroscience Meeting, CNS 2006, Edinburgh, Scotland, July 16-20, poster T5, (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)

  9. Franzius, M., Sprekeler, H., and Wiskott, L. (8. June 2006).
    Slowness leads to place cells.
    Proc. Berlin Neuroscience Forum 2006, Bad Liebenwalde, June 8-10, publ. Max-Delbrück-Centrum für Molekulare Medizin (MDC), Berlin, p. 42, (abstract).
    (bibtex, abstract.html)


Related Projects:


setup December 14, 2006; updated August 26, 2009
Laurenz Wiskott, http://www.neuroinformatik.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/PEOPLE/wiskott/