Experiments with rodents demonstrate that visual cues play an important role in the control of hippocampal place cells and spatial navigation. Nevertheless, rats may also rely on auditory, olfactory and somatosensory stimuli for orientation. It is also known that rats can track odors or self-generated scent marks to find a food source. Here we model odor supported place cells by using a simple feed-forward network and analyze the impact of olfactory cues on place cell formation and spatial navigation. The obtained place cells are used to solve a goal navigation task by a novel mechanism based on self-marking by odor patches combined with a Q-learning algorithm. We also analyze the impact of place cell remapping on goal directed behavior when switching between two environments. We emphasize the importance of olfactory cues in place cell formation and show that the utility of environmental and self-generated olfactory cues, together with a mixed navigation strategy, improves goal directed navigation.

中文翻译：

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气味支持啮齿类动物的位置细胞模型和目标导航。


啮齿动物实验表明，视觉线索在海马位置细胞和空间导航的控制中发挥着重要作用。然而，老鼠也可能依靠听觉、嗅觉和体感刺激来定位。人们还知道，老鼠可以追踪气味或自身产生的气味标记来寻找食物来源。在这里，我们通过使用简单的前馈网络对气味支持的位置细胞进行建模，并分析嗅觉线索对位置细胞形成和空间导航的影响。所获得的位置细胞通过一种基于气味斑块自标记并结合 Q 学习算法的新颖机制来解决目标导航任务。我们还分析了在两个环境之间切换时位置细胞重新映射对目标导向行为的影响。我们强调嗅觉线索在位置细胞形成中的重要性，并表明环境和自身生成的嗅觉线索的效用以及混合导航策略可以改善目标导向导航。