Progress on the CBMM challenge questions: Where did I come from? Where am I going?

Abstract: In the Jeopardy/Watson effort every week on Friday there was an evaluation of performance. We continue the series of weekly discussions and reports on each CBMM challenge question [e.g. what is there? what will happen next? what are they doing? etc] describing progress and problems of ongoing work at CBMM.

This week we propose to add two new  questions to the CBMM Challenge set: Where did I come from? Where am I going? We describe how the hippocampus my answer these questions. In particular, we will elaborate on the known spatial representations of the rodent hippocampus and explore how these representations can be used for solving problems. We will also present new findings that show how hippocampus interacts with cortex during periods in which rats disengage from ongoing tasks. We will discuss the possibility that this interaction reveals how hippocampus participates in cognitive functions such as planning, remembering the past and imagining the future. Lastly, we will present ongoing computational work that employs hidden Markov models to represent spatial trajectories encoded by hippocampal ensemble spiking patterns.