Many animals learn cognitive maps of their environment - a simultaneous representation of context, experience, and position.

A central problem to understanding intelligence is the concept of generalisation. This allows previously learnt structure to be exploited to solve tasks in novel situations differing in their particularities.

Neural Information Processing Systems http://nips.cc/

First, each place cell has localized spatial coding which fires inrestricted regions ofa givenenvironment (placefields)[7,8].

Many animals learn cognitive maps of their environment - a simultaneous representation of context, experience, and position. Place cells in the hippocampus, named for their explicit encoding of position, are believed to be a neural substrate of these maps, with place cell remapping explaining how this system can represent different contexts. Briefly, place cells alter their firing properties, or remap, in response to changes in experiential or sensory cues. Substantial sensory changes, produced, e.g., by moving between environments, cause large subpopulations of place cells to change their tuning entirely. While many studies have looked at the physiological basis of remapping, we lack explicit calculations of how the contextual capacity of the place cell system changes as a function of place field firing properties.