Identifying causal structure in a biological neural network

A simulator for the Burgess, Recce, and O'Keefe (1994) BRO model of rodent navigation was built. Initial experiments did not reproduce the navigation performance reported by BRO. To determine the cause of the discrepancy, we reconstructed and reanalyzed their model. We were able to verify their main claim that if phase-modulated place cells act as radial basis functions, then they computationally have the ability to support memory-based navigation. However, our simulations were unable to reproduce their model of hippocampal cell place field acquisition.