<p><span>Are you passionate about advancing Machine Learning by integrating insights from the natural sciences? Are you eager to bridge the 3rd (<em><span>computational</span></em>) and 4th (<em><span...

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Sequence transformations, like visual motion, dominate the world around us, but are poorly handled by current models. We introduce the first flow equivariant models that respect these motion symmetrie...

Traveling waves of neural activity are widely observed in the brain, but their precise computational function remains unclear. One prominent hypothesis is that they enable the transfer and integration...

The act of vision is a coordinated activity involving millions of neurons in the visual cortex, which communicate over distances spanning up to centimeters on the cortical surface. How do […]

The receptive field of a visual neuron is classically defined as the region of space (or retina) where a visual stimulus evokes a change in its firing activity. At the cortical level, a challenging is...

In this Review, Sato et al. summarize the evidence in favor of traveling waves in primary visual cortex. The authors suggest that their substrate may lie in long-range horizontal connections and that ...