hippocampal place-cell proximity model best fits human spatial memory responses
Exact: 1/(d+c)
The best-fitting model of human spatial memory in a resized enclosure matched hippocampal place-cell proximity responses
Subjects' errors when recalling a cued location after arena resizing were compared against several geometric models. The winning model was adapted from the firing properties of place cells in the rat hippocampus: it represents a location by the proximity 1/(d+c) to each of the four surrounding walls, where d is wall distance and c is a global constant. This suggests that human spatial memory encodes location in an abstract, wall-proximity format consistent with hippocampal neural representations rather than simply storing absolute distances or pure proportional ratios.
The best fitting model was one derived from the response properties of 'place cells' in the rat hippocampus, which matches the 'proximities' 1/(d+c) of the cue to the four walls of the arena, where d is the distance to a wall and c is a global constant.
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