The inevitability and superfluousness of cell types in spatial cognition

Abstract

SummaryDiscoveries of functional cell types, exemplified by the cataloging of spatial cells in the hippocampal formation, are heralded as scientific breakthroughs. We question whether the identification of cell types based on human intuitions has scientific merit and suggest that “spatial cells” may arise in non-spatial computations of sufficient complexity. We show that deep neural networks (DNNs) for object recognition, which lack spatial grounding, contain numerous units resembling place, border, and head-direction cells. Strikingly, even untrained DNNs with randomized weights contained such units and support decoding of spatial information. Moreover, when these “spatial” units are excluded, spatial information can be decoded from the remaining DNN units, which highlights the superfluousness of cell types to spatial cognition. Now that large-scale simulations are feasible, the complexity of the brain should be respected and intuitive notions of cell type, which can be misleading and arise in any complex network, should be relegated to history.