An explainable artificial intelligence approach to spatial navigation based on hippocampal circuitry.

Learning to navigate a complex environment is not a difficult task for a mammal. For example, finding the correct way to exit a maze following a sequence of cues, does not need a long training session. Just a single or a few runs through a new environment is, in most cases, sufficient to learn an exit path starting from anywhere in the maze.

Sequence Learning in a Single Trial: A Spiking Neurons Model Based on Hippocampal Circuitry.

In contrast with our everyday experience using brain circuits, it can take a prohibitively long time to train a computational system to produce the correct sequence of outputs in the presence of a series of inputs. This suggests that something important is missing in the way in which models are trying to reproduce basic cognitive functions. In this work, we introduce a new neuronal network architecture that is able to learn, in a single trial, an arbitrary long sequence of any known objects.