A COUPLED ATTRACTOR MODEL OF THE RODENT HEAD DIRECTION SYSTEM

Head direction (HD) cells, abundant in the rat postsubiculum and anter ior thalamic nuclei, fire maximally when the rat's head is facing a pa rticular direction. The activity of a population of these cells forms a distributed representation of the animal's current heading. We descr ibe a neural network model that creates a stable, distributed represen tation of head direction and updates that representation in response t o angular velocity information. In contrast to earlier models, our mod el of the head direction system accurately tracks a series of actual r at head rotations, and, using biologically plausible neurons, it fits the single-cell tuning curves of real HD cells recorded from rats exec uting those same rotations. The model makes neurophysiological predict ions that can be tested using current technologies.