ABSTRACT
The human brain is, arguably, the most complex system in the universe. Its several hundred billion elements, organized at various levels of description, permit organisms to interact adaptively with a wide variety of environments. Understanding how this is done is an important goal of cognitive neuroscience. General principles which could underlie complex brain function were suggested some time ago (cf. Hebb, 1949; Marr, 1969, 1971; McCulloch & Pitts, 1943), but the computational power needed to permit simulations of complex behaviors with neurobiologically realistic neural nets has only recently come into existence. This chapter is intended to illustrate how some simple network models are guiding the design and interpretation of neurophysiological research concerned with understanding the neural coding, storage, and transformation of spatial information. It begins with an analysis of spatial cognition, moves on to a discussion of network models in the nervous system, continues with a description of certain aspects of the anatomy, physiology, and dynamics of a particular neural system–the hippocampal formation–known to be critical in spatial cognition, and concludes with the description of a conceptual model of spatial representation and cognition that reflects many of these structural and functional features.
