ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2021
Place cells may simply be memory cells: Memory compression leads to spatial tuning and history dependence.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 52 papers.
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52 citing papers in PubMed, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
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- A simple model of co-emergence of grid and place fields.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
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- Distributed neural codes of the 3D position in the marmoset frontal cortex and hippocampus.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Spatial remapping in the subicular complex and entorhinal cortex follows low-dimensional geometric principles.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Sparsity and memory constraints interact with training sequence to bias learning of associative maps.Neuropsychologia · 2026Article
- A mathematical theory for understanding when abstract representations emerge in neural networks.ArXiv · 2026Article
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- Composing egocentric and allocentric maps for flexible navigation.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- REMI: Reconstructing Episodic Memory During Internally Driven Path Planning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- A compressed code for memory discrimination.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Three types of remapping with linear decoders: A population-geometric perspective.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Three types of remapping with linear decoders: a population-geometric perspective.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
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- Representational drift as the consequence of ongoing memory storage.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Time Makes Space: Emergence of Place Fields in Networks Encoding Temporally Continuous Sensory Experiences.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Repulsion of hippocampal representations driven by distinct internal beliefs.Current biology : CB · 2025Article
- Resolving a paradox about how vision is transformed into familiarity.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- Brain-wide microstrokes affect the stability of memory circuits in the hippocampus.Nature communications · 2025Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 1 country.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The observation of place cells has suggested that the hippocampus plays a special role in encoding spatial information. However, place cell responses are modulated by several nonspatial variables and reported to be rather unstable. Here, we propose a memory model of the hippocampus that provides an interpretation of place cells consistent with these observations. We hypothesize that the hippocampus is a memory device that takes advantage of the correlations between sensory experiences to generate compressed representations of the episodes that are stored in memory. A simple neural network model that can efficiently compress information naturally produces place cells that are similar to those observed in experiments. It predicts that the activity of these cells is variable and that the fluctuations of the place fields encode information about the recent history of sensory experiences. Place cells may simply be a consequence of a memory compression process implemented in the hippocampus.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.