About his PhD project

In their brains, animals form internal representations of objects, body posture or extended spatial environments. From these representations, they perform complex computations like the optimization of spatial trajectories. The brain activities that give rise to these computations are not yet understood and are the subject of very intense research, both experimental and theoretical. These problems have been explored in simplified 2D environments and have led to the characterization of cells coding for various spatial parameters (place cells, grid cells, head direction cells). However, recently, traces of neural activities have been found to correlate with 3D representations. In bats and mice, for instance, the activity of some neurons depends on the 3D orientation of the head of the animal. During this PhD, we propose to study the possible neural networks that can sustain such representations.