There has been extensive research in recent years on the multi-scale nature of hippocampal place cells and entorhinal grid cells encoding which led to many speculations on their role in spatial cognition. In this paper we focus on the multi-scale nature of place cells and how they contribute to faster learning during goal-oriented navigation when compared to a spatial cognition system composed of single scale place cells. The task consists of a circular arena with a fixed goal location, in which a robot is trained to find the shortest path to the goal after a number of learning trials. Synaptic connections are modified using a reinforcement learning paradigm adapted to the place cells multi-scale architecture. The model is evaluated in both simulation and physical robots. We find that larger scale and combined multi-scale representations favor goal-oriented navigation task learning.
Keywords: Hippocampus; Multiscale spatial representation; Place cells; Reinforcement learning; Spatial cognition model.
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