A self-organizing VQ model of head-direction cells and grid cells

In this article, we propose a three-layered self-organizing model to extract the head direction and position of a moving object separately. The model consists of three layers, each of which is a self-organizing vector quantization (VQ) model. The second layer receives inhibitory input from the first, and the third layer receives inhibitory input from the first and second. The first layer is to detect the head direction, and the second and third are to detect the position. The information representation in the second and third layers is shown to be a multi-ary expression, and the units in the third layer develop a receptive field with a grid structure, as was observed in the entorhinal cortex of a rat.