Neurobiological challenge on visually attentive navigation: Who triggers the development of hippocampal Place Fields? Who responds for the appearance of motivational status to navigate?

This study was designed for a discussion about why the many relevant and intriguing recent findings on hippocampal and entorhinal cortical neurobiology/neurophysiology sustain the hypothesis that Place Fields are primarily dependent of emergent hippocampal activity changing from a chaotic to self-organized maps. These SOM are called as “Firing Fields”, because, by just a very short time-window, there is not yet specificity. Neuro-scientific literature supports the propositions: there is no evidence that such emergent activity would be primarily dependent of visual environmental stimuli. On the other hand, it is highly correlated with attentive behavior, which could work as a gateway where many systems compete for assuming the dependency of these SOM. Starting here, attention would be the key to distribute the many cognitive tasks through prefrontal cortex, amygdala, etc., throughout the hippocampal complex. The present hypothesis is sufficient feasible to be joined to that from O´keefe and Nadel. However, it extends the concept of “Cognitive Map” to a more general behavior supporting also the Non-Cognitive behavior occurring during attention. So, the building of the called “Place Fields” would be changed on two main ways: 1. the hippocampus sustains, during attention, the building of “Behavioral-dependent Plastic Fields” (BPF), 2. the formed SOM, or BPF, would be the beacon of the many cognitive and non-cognitive behaviors.