Bounded Invariance and the Formation of Place Fields

One current explanation of the view independent representation of space by the place-cells of the hippocampus is that they arise out of the summation of view dependent Gaussians. This proposal assumes thatvisual representations show bounded invariance. Here we investigate whether a recently proposed visual encoding scheme called the temporal population code can provide such representations. Ouranalysis is based on the behavior of a simulated robot in a virtual environment containing specific visual cues. Our results showthat the temporal population code provides a representational substratethat can naturally account for the formation of place fields.