Users expressed gratitude and approval for studies on heterogeneous cells driving navigation and neural consistency boosting learning in mouse brains, noting there is much to read on the findings.
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I am the Nayebi of the paper you reference :) Actually, our knockout experiments in Fig. 4D make the prediction that the border & grid cells people have long overstudied do not drastically matter for navigation compared to the heterogeneous cells that make up most of the region & have long been ignored/naturally arise through optimization of place-cell-based integration.
Let me give you an example to make it clear what I’m trying to say. Consider the paper you referenced by Nayebi. They first studied organic medial entorhinal cortex cells. The rest of the paper basically talks about how they learned from data that to improve neural models of the brain region. Pretty much the rest of their paper talks about in silico simulations of those whose result improved existing neural networks but – like good science should do - I can see no findings that suggested deeper understanding of the organic mechanisms, predictions from those models that might be observable in your organic system, or for that matter any suggestions to guide further data collection. In short, in that paper, I found nothing that suggests they discovered things about the brain that we did not already know, but rather they found ways to improve their models. Is this useful of course. What does this “teach us about the brain”? That is not evident at all. Ergo my original post stands.
@aran_nayebi @dyamins Then I stand corrected
There's a few studies to point to that support this. Perhaps the closest experiment done in biological brains to what we did in ANNs is Malone et al. 2024 Nature Comms: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-45853-4 They imaged large MEC populations while mice learned a novel virtual environment over ten days. Position decoding from just 50 randomly selected MEC cells (their Fig. 4g) improved with learning & correlated with behavioral performance, and they showed that the consistency of non-grid cells was higher than that of grid cells. Most importantly, optogenetically disrupting the spatial consistency of the population impaired memory-guided navigation. I'd love to see more experiments in this direction where there are further cell-type-specific refined knockouts -- it's often difficult to optogenetically target *functional* cell types (and the advantage of models is we can do this far more quickly than the biologists can, allowing us to generate predictions!)
@aran_nayebi @dyamins A reasonable follow up: Has that prediction been verified by experiment on organic cells? (I found no repeatable experiments in the literature.) If yes, then I was most definitely wrong. If not, then I stand by my original post.
@aran_nayebi @dyamins A reasonable follow up: Has that prediction been verified by experiment on organic cells? (I found no repeatable experiments in the literature.) If yes, then I was most definitely wrong. If not, then I stand by my original post.
@aran_nayebi @dyamins Very good, then. Thank you for your patience with me. Sigh. There is so much to read, and so little time...