I think I can better articulate my inquiry after thinking this over for a few days.
So, the goal of these grid cells is to uniquely represent each location in an environment by having the hexagonal lattice “cover over” all possible locations of that environment with equally spaced place fields.
Assuming that is an accurate premise, then the question is: how would I initialize these place fields for a given set of grid cells (in modules), assuming this is the very first environment to be learned, so no previous place fields exist? And then how would they grow to represent the environment as it is explored?
AFAICT, you can’t create the grid before you know the extent of the environment, so it has to start from nothing and then be learned through movement, right?
I don’t expect the answer to this to be biologically accurate really, since I highly doubt this is known. Who knows.
I figured I might as well pose this questioning here while I try to hack up my own (probably dumb) solution.