no need for a cognitive map decentralized memory for insect navigation不需要认知地图分散记忆昆虫导航.pdfVIP

No Need for a Cognitive Map: Decentralized Memory for Insect Navigation 1 ¨ 2,3 Holk Cruse *, Rudiger Wehner ¨ ¨ 1 Biological Cybernetics, and Center for Excellence CITEC, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany, 2 Brain Research Institute, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland, ¨ ¨ 3 Biocenter, University of Wurzburg, Wurzburg, Germany Abstract In many animals the ability to navigate over long distances is an important prerequisite for foraging. For example, it is widely accepted that desert ants and honey bees, but also mammals, use path integration for finding the way back to their home site. It is however a matter of a long standing debate whether animals in addition are able to acquire and use so called cognitive maps. Such a ‘map’, a global spatial representation of the foraging area, is generally assumed to allow the animal to find shortcuts between two sites although the direct connection has never been travelled before. Using the artificial neural network approach, here we develop an artificial memory system which is based on path integration and various landmark guidance mechanisms (a bank of individual and independent landmark-defined memory elements). Activation of the individual memory elements depends on a separate motivation network and an, in part, asymmetrical lateral inhibition network. The information concerning the absolute position of the agent is present, but resides in a separate memory that can only be used by the path integration subsystem to control the behaviour, but cannot be used for computational purposes with other memory elements of the system.