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.
Keywords Self-marking navigation - Reinforcement learning - Q-learning - Place cell directionality - Remapping
Action Editor: Wulfram Gerstner
An erratum to this article can be found online at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10827-010-0216-9