RI: SMALL: Collabrative Research: Investigations of the Role of Dorsal versus Ventral Place and Grid Cells during Multi-Scale Spatial Navigation in Rats and Robots

RI：小：协作研究：大鼠和机器人多尺度空间导航期间背侧与腹侧位置和网格细胞的作用的调查

• 批准号: 1117303
• 负责人: Alfredo Weitzenfeld
• 金额: $ 21.91万
• 依托单位: University of South Florida
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-09-01 至 2015-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1117303&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RI; SMALL; Collabrative; Research; Investigations

Spatial navigation is a complex cognitive process that relies on robust and adaptive mechanisms to relate current and future spatial positions to specific locations in the environment. The goal of this project is to provide a better understanding of spatial navigation by integrating information obtained from experimental studies in rats, computational models, and experiments on robots that will test new hypotheses on how these mechanisms work. The hippocampus and medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) are major brain regions involved in mammalian spatial navigation. While the role of place cells in the hippocampus has been extensively studied, there are still many open questions on the functional role of MEC grid cells and their interaction with the hippocampal place cells. Of interest to this proposal is the recent finding that grid cells are organized in an orderly fashion along the dorso-ventral axis of the MEC, with dorsal grids being much more tightly spaced than ventral ones. The investigators hypothesize that this multiscale organization endows the navigation system with a coding mechanism that will inherently achieve robustness with respect to external perturbations such as obstacles or unexpected changes in visual cues. In order to evaluate this hypothesis the investigators will develop computational and robotic models while systematically performing experiments in rat in which the dorsal or ventral portions of MEC or hippocampus will be inactivated. They will introduce new types of mazes in which the spatial frequency of the trajectories will be controlled. This work will contribute to better spatial navigation in robotics by: (1) providing a robotic testbed to evaluate hypotheses on the role of the entorhinal cortex and (2) providing biologically plausible models for robust spatial navigation under uncertain and dynamic environments. These models will suggest alternatives to classical probabilistic methods commonly used in robot Simultaneous Localization And Mapping paradigms. This work will also contribute to studies of spatial navigation in rats by: (1) showing the usefulness of robots in providing a physical testbed beyond pure computational modeling, and (2) exploiting the shorter cycle of robot experimentation to produce maze configurations that are optimal for testing specific hypotheses in rat experiments.

空间导航是一个复杂的认知过程，它依赖于强大的自适应机制，将当前和未来的空间位置与环境中的特定位置相关联。该项目的目标是通过整合从大鼠实验研究，计算模型和机器人实验中获得的信息来更好地理解空间导航，这些实验将测试关于这些机制如何工作的新假设。海马和内侧内嗅皮层（MEC）是哺乳动物参与空间导航的主要脑区。虽然位置细胞在海马中的作用已被广泛研究，但MEC网格细胞的功能作用及其与海马位置细胞的相互作用仍有许多悬而未决的问题。有趣的是，最近的研究发现，网格细胞的组织在一个有序的方式沿着背腹轴的MEC，背侧网格比腹侧的更紧密的间隔。研究人员假设，这种多尺度组织赋予导航系统一种编码机制，这种编码机制将内在地实现相对于外部扰动（如障碍物或视觉线索的意外变化）的鲁棒性。为了评估这一假设，研究人员将开发计算和机器人模型，同时系统地在大鼠中进行实验，其中MEC或海马的背侧或腹侧部分将被灭活。他们将引入新类型的迷宫，其中轨迹的空间频率将被控制。这项工作将有助于更好的空间导航机器人：（1）提供一个机器人测试平台，以评估内嗅皮层的作用的假设和（2）提供生物学上合理的模型，在不确定和动态的环境下强大的空间导航。这些模型将建议替代经典的概率方法，通常用于机器人同时定位和地图范例。这项工作也将有助于大鼠空间导航的研究：（1）显示机器人在提供超越纯计算建模的物理测试平台方面的有用性，以及（2）利用机器人实验的较短周期来产生迷宫配置，这些配置对于在大鼠实验中测试特定假设是最佳的。