Learning Place Cell Representations and Context-Dependent Remapping

Hippocampal place cells are known for their spatially selective firing patterns, which has led to the suggestion that they encode an animal's location. However, place cells also respond to contextual cues, such as smell. Furthermore, they have the ability to remap, wherein the firing fields and rates of cells change in response to changes in the environment. How place cell responses emerge, and how these representations remap is not fully understood. In this work, we propose a similarity-based objective function that translates proximity in space, to proximity in representation.