Memories are thought to be attractor states of neuronal representations, with the hippocampus a likely substrate for context-dependent episodic memories. However, such states have not been directly observed. For example, the hippocampal place cell representation of location was previously found to respond continuously to changes in environmental shape alone. We report that exposure to novel squ...

Place cells in the hippocampus fire at specific positions in space, and distal cues in the environment play critical roles in determining the spatial firing patterns of place cells. Many studies have shown that place fields are influenced by distal cues in foraging animals. However, it is largely unknown whether distal-cue-dependent changes in place fields appear in different ways in a memory t...

Memory interference is a common cause of forgetting. Interference is a byproduct of the need to balance the formation of well-differentiated representations against the ability to retrieve memories from cues that are not identical to the original experience. How the brain accomplishes this has remained elusive. Here we review how insights can be gained from studies of an apparently unrelated ph...

Recreating real places – as distinct from virtual spaces or environments – using virtual reality technology raises a series of significant challenges. Fortunately there is a large body of existing research into the experience of place which might reasonably contribute to our understanding of the task. This paper reviews key aspects of the 'place' literature, relates them to the concept of prese...

High-performance Placement and Routing for the Nanometer Scale

The most common kind of collections for GIR so far are the Web and other document collections, which are mainly textual. This paper is concerned with the non-trivial relationship between reference to place in natural language (NL) and common GIR assumptions. There are two main ways in which NL texts and GIR meet: in the attempt to derive or populate geo-ontologies from text itself, and in the a...