Topological decoding of grid cell activity via path lifting to covering spaces

Abstract: High-dimensional neural activity often reside in a low-dimensional subspace, referred to as neural manifolds. Grid cells in the medial entorhinal cortex provide a periodic spatial code that are organized near a toroidal manifold, independent of the spatial environment. Due to the periodic nature of its code, it is unclear how the brain utilizes the toroidal manifold to understand its state in a spatial environment. We introduce a novel framework that decodes spatial information from grid cell activity using topology. Our approach uses topological data analysis to extract toroidal coordinates from grid cell population activity and employs path-lifting to reconstruct trajectories in physical space. The reconstructed paths differ from the original by an affine transformation. We validated the method on both continuous attractor network simulations and experimental recordings of grid cells, demonstrating that local trajectories can be reliably reconstructed from a single grid cell module without external position information or training data. These results suggest that co-modular grid cells contain sufficient information for path integration and suggest a potential computational mechanism for spatial navigation.