Meisam Emamjome successfully passes his MPhil/PhD transfer
Tuesday 19 June 2007
Congratulations to Meisam Emamjome, who successfully transferred from MPhil to PhD after his viva examination on the 15th June. Meisam is researching computational navigation and implementing biologically inspired algorithms on a Khepera robot.
"Different pathways of research on the rats’ hippocampus, including anatomical and neurophysiological, have led to a general assumption that the locus of animals’ navigation skills is likely to be the hippocampus and the related infrastructures such as entorhinal cortex, anterior thalamus and subiculum nucelus. Place cells, head direction cells and grid cells, found in different interrelated parts of animal brain, can be major components of a system that provide spatial representation of environment. Computational models are aimed at providing further insights to the origin of activity of aforementioned cell types’ activity pattern. Hypothetically, path-integration (accumulation of trajectory vector of animals’ position) or landmark learning can derive the spatial representation. Path-integration has been modelled by attractor networks in both head direction cells and place cells formation and proved to be an appropriate method of modelling in the hippocampus literature. Beside, attractor networks have been used in formation of grid cells and their association with place cells provide more insight to spatial representation development in animals. A review of the current biological evidences on the hippocampus and the related computational models is given and a new model with consideration of the properties of grid cells is hypothesized."