Using Focus to Direct Environmental Mapping

Biological data reveal that the activation of hippocampal place cells is highly correlated to the process of landmark detection when animals are performing navigational tasks. As a functional approximation to hippocampal place learning, this paper presents a network model that can be used by an autonomous agent to map landmarks, places and the spatial relation between them. For the network to be used to map a large space, a focusing mechanism is introduced in the network to direct environmental mapping and to limit the amount of computation needed.