Why place cells fire in many fields across large spaces: a hierarchical predictive map ties field statistics to the scale of behavior
In large environments at naturalistic scale, rat and bat hippocampal CA1 place cells often carry multiple irregularly spaced firing fields, whereas the classical single-scale successor representation holds only in small enclosures. The factorised hierarchical successor representation (fHSR) folds one-step actions together with subgoal-directed subroutines into a predictive map, then decomposes the maps of several tasks into a non-negative overcomplete basis that gives each model cell its tuning. On a 48 m rat track and a 200 m bat track the model reproduced the gamma-Poisson overdispersion of field counts, and it predicted a spatial periodicity of population activity whose wavelength is independent of track length, a prediction tested in rat data.