From their abstract:
``One of the most exciting and promising novel architectures, the Transformer neural network, was developed without the brain in mind. In this work, we show that transformers, when equipped with recurrent position encodings, replicate the precisely tuned spatial representations of the hippocampal formation; most notably place and grid cells. Furthermore, we show that this result is no surprise since it is closely related to current hippocampal models from neuroscience. We additionally show the transformer version offers dramatic performance gains over the neuroscience version.``