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The Emergence of Mental Maps in Navigation
In 1971, John O'Keefe established a mechanism. The hippocampus in the human brain has what are known as place cells. There are certain neurons that fire when organisms visit certain locations. They are building what he called cognitive maps or mental maps of the environment. Now, flip that to the AI or the robotics world. Could agents learn to build internal mental maps without any previous predisposition to mapping? Why would we want to answer that question? Because if we find out that if you train an agent just to do navigation, without giving it a mapping module, and mapping still emerges, that suggests that mapping is playing a fundamental role in navigation.