A proposed architecture for the neural representation of spatial context

The role of context in guiding animal behavior has attracted increasing attention in recent years, but little is known about what constitutes a context, nor how and where in the brain it is represented. Contextual stimuli can take many forms, but of particular importance are those that collectively define a particular place or situation. The representation of place has been linked to the hippocampus, because its principal neurons ('place cells') are spatially responsive; behavioral experiments also implicate this structure in the processing of contextual stimuli. Together, these findings suggest a hippocampal role in representing 'spatial context'. The present article outlines a proposed architecture for the encoding of spatial context in which spatial inputs to place cells are modulated (or 'gated') by non-spatial stimuli. We discuss recent experimental evidence that spatial context is population-coded, a property which could allow both discrimination between overlapping contexts and generalization across them, and thus provide a foundation for animals' capacity for flexible context-linked place learning.