Multi-scale place fields provide a predictive basis for hierarchical control

The factorised hierarchical successor representation (fHSR) predicts spatial periodicity in hippocampal population firing rates with a characteristic wavelength independent of environmental size.

• Why it matters: Existing hippocampal predictive-map theories struggle to scale to naturalistic, large environments and to explain heterogeneous, multi-field place-cell structure.
• What they did: The authors introduce fHSR for hierarchical, subgoal-directed control, then test it by matching multi-scale CA1 place-cell statistics and topology in rats and bats and by analyzing experimental firing-rate data for periodicity.
• The result: fHSR generalizes efficiently across tasks, scales favorably with environment size, reproduces key multi-scale CA1 characteristics, and confirms the wavelength-independent spatial periodicity prediction.

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