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Original Research Article
Technical Integration of Hippocampus, Basal Ganglia and Physical Models for Spatial Navigation

1  Department of Biophysics, KFKI Research Institute for Particle and Nuclear Physics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
2  Adaptive Behaviour Research Group, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Pure Science, University of Sheffield, UK


Computational neuroscience is increasingly moving beyond modeling individual neurons or neural systems to consider the integration of multiple models, often constructed by different research groups. We report on our preliminary integration of recent hippocampal formation, basal ganglia and physical environment models, together with visualisation tools, as a case study in the use of Python across the modeling tool-chain. The system incorporates leaky-integrator and rate-coded neurons, a 3D environment with collision detection and tactile sensors, 3D graphics and 2D plots. We found Python to be a flexible platform, offering a significant reduction in development time, without a corresponding significant increase in execution time. We illustrate this by implementing a part of the model in various alternative languages and coding styles, and comparing their execution times. For very large scale system integration, communication with other languages and parallel execution may be required, which we demonstrate using the BRAHMS framework's Python bindings.

Keywords: hippocampus, spatial navigation, basal ganglia, Python, place cells, plus-maze, BRAHMS

Received: 10 September 2008; paper pending published: 21 October 2008;

Edited by: 
Rolf Kötter, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands

Copyright: © Prescott, Fox, Humphries, Mitchinson, Somogyva and Kiss. This is an open-access article subject to an exclusive license agreement between the authors and the Frontiers Research Foundation, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

*Correspondence: Charles W. Fox, Adaptive Behaviour Research Group, Department of Psychology, Faculty of Pure Science, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, South Yorkshire, UK . charles.fox@sheffield.ac.uk

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