➡️ The model learns place cells from border cells, with no grid cells needed.

➡️ These artificial place cells "remap" just like real ones when the environment changes.

➡️ A strange finding: The place cell centers form a hexagonal grid! 🤯 We even found preliminary evidence for this in mouse brains.

Learning place cells and remapping by decoding the cognitive map Border cells are sufficient to generate place cells and remapping during path integration in artificial neural networks, challenging the role of grid cells for spatial navigation.

New research in eLife challenges some long-held ideas about place cells and grid cells and suggests a powerful border-to-place cell pathway for navigation.

Check it out: doi.org/10.7554/eLif...

#Neuroskyence #CompNeuro #AI #PlaceCells #CognitiveMaps

What do you think about the role of movement in perception for next-generation AI systems?
#AI #NeuralNetworks #ActiveSensing #CellularAutomata #Robotics #Perception #MachineLearning #ArtificialLife

6/6

Fantastic work by the talented @Mia-Katrin Kvalsund and the team @sidneypontesfilho.bsky.social, @kyrre2000.bsky.social , and @kaiolae.bsky.social

5/6

YouTube video by Mikkel Lepperød Presenting the Active Neural Cellular Automata (ANCA)

For more info, see our video description at youtu.be/-ERmvXo0XTs

And the entire manuscript at www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

4/6

YouTube video by Mikkel Lepperød Presenting the Active Neural Cellular Automata (ANCA)

Our research bridges neuroscience and AI by showing how distributed neural architectures can interact with movement, offering new insights for adaptive, embodied AI systems.

This could be particularly valuable for robotics applications where sensor movement and fault tolerance are crucial.

3/6

YouTube video by Mikkel Lepperød Presenting the Active Neural Cellular Automata (ANCA)

1️⃣ Active sensing emerges without explicit attention mechanisms
2️⃣ Movement allows the system to focus on salient information, simplifying classification tasks
3️⃣ The architecture becomes highly scalable when paired with movement
4️⃣ These systems show remarkable fault tolerance to damaged sensors
2/6

YouTube video by Mikkel Lepperød Presenting the Active Neural Cellular Automata (ANCA)

🔬 Excited to share our new paper: "Sensor Movement Drives Emergent Attention and Scalability in Active Neural Cellular Automata"

We found that when neural systems can move their sensors (like animals do!), they develop attention-like behaviors without being explicitly programmed to do so. Post 1/6

@gauteeinevoll.bsky.social

Read more about the workshop here:
www.simula.no/about/news/n...

And here is the program:
www.mn.uio.no/ccse/english...

You can find them both at BrainInspired and in the Theoretical Neurocience Podcast:
braininspired.co/podcast/195/
braininspired.co/podcast/196/
theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn19/
theoreticalneuroscience.no/thn20/

I recently participated in two podcast episodes by Paul Middlebrooks (Brain Inspired) and Gaute Einevoll (Theoretical Neuroscience). These conversations were recorded aboard the Hurtigruten cruise ship during a workshop on NeuroAI that I had the pleasure of organizing.

Inferring causal connectivity from pairwise recordings and optogenetics Author summary Understanding the interactions between neurons is essential for grasping brain function. Neuroscientists often face a challenge when stimulating multiple neurons simultaneously: determi...

Proud to see this research build on concepts from our own paper, "Inferring Causal Connectivity from Pairwise Recordings and Optogenetics,". It’s amazing to see how these tools continue to push the boundaries of understanding brain connectivity and function! 💡🔬

journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol...

The fly connectome reveals a path to the effectome - Nature Analysis of the whole-brain fly connectome reveals high-dimensional dynamics supported by many small independent circuits, motivating a proposal for optogenetic perturbation to efficiently learn a who...

#NeuroScience #Connectomics #CausalInference #Optogenetics #IV

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

🧠🚀 Exciting new developments in neuroscience! The recent paper "The Fly Connectome Reveals a Path to the Effectome" takes an innovative step forward by combining instrumental variables (IV) with Bayesian priors to efficiently estimate effective connectivity, and how neural circuits drive behavior. 🦟