Endotaxis: A neuromorphic algorithm for mapping, goal-learning, navigation, and patrolling

Creators: Zhang, Tony; Rosenberg, Matthew; Jing, Zeyu; Perona, Pietro¹; Meister, Markus¹

1. California Institute of Technology

Abstract

An animal entering a new environment typically faces three challenges: explore the space for resources, memorize their locations, and navigate towards those targets as needed. Here we propose a neural algorithm that can solve all these problems and operates reliably in diverse and complex environments. At its core, the mechanism makes use of a behavioral module common to all motile animals, namely the ability to follow an odor to its source. We show how the brain can learn to generate internal “virtual odors” that guide the animal to any location of interest. This endotaxis algorithm can be implemented with a simple 3-layer neural circuit using only biologically realistic structures and learning rules. Several neural components of this scheme are found in brains from insects to humans. Nature may have evolved a general mechanism for search and navigation on the ancient backbone of chemotaxis.

Copyright and License

© 2023, Zhang et al. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain (grant 543015 to MM and 543025 to PP), NSF award 1564330 to PP, and a gift from Google to PP.

Contributions

Tony Zhang, Conceptualization, Software, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – review and editing; Matthew Rosenberg, Conceptualization, Investigation, Writing – review and editing; Zeyu Jing, Formal analysis, Investigation, Writing – review and editing; Pietro Perona, Conceptualization, Formal analysis, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing – review and editing; Markus Meister, Conceptualization, Data curation, Software, Formal analysis, Supervision, Funding acquisition, Investigation, Writing - original draft, Writing – review and editing

Data Availability

Data and code to reproduce the reported results are openly available at https://github.com/markusmeister/Endotaxis-2023 (copy archived at Meister, 2024).

Conflict of Interest

The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the
decision to submit the work for publication.

Markus Meister: Reviewing editor, eLife. The other authors declare that no competing interests exist.

Files

elife-84141-v1.pdf

	All versions	This version
Views	0	0
Downloads	0	0
Data volume	0 Bytes	0 Bytes