The 'cognitive map' hypothesis proposes that brain builds a unified representation of the spatial environment to support memory and guide future action. Forty years of electrophysiological research in rodents suggests that cognitive maps are neurally instantiated by place, grid, border, and head direction cells in the hippocampal formation and related structures. Here we review recent work that suggests a similar functional organization in the human brain and reveals novel insights into how cognitive maps are used during spatial navigation. Specifically, these studies indicate that: (i) the human hippocampus and entorhinal cortex support map-like spatial codes; (ii) posterior brain regions such as parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortices provide critical inputs that allow cognitive maps to be anchored to fixed environmental landmarks; (iii) hippocampal and entorhinal spatial codes are used in conjunction with frontal lobe mechanisms to plan routes during navigation. We also discuss how these three basic elements of cognitive map based navigation-spatial coding, landmark anchoring, and route planning-might be applied to non-spatial domains to provide the building blocks for many core elements of human thought.4

In a widely used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data analysis method, functional regions of interest (fROIs) are handpicked in each participant using macroanatomic landmarks as guides, and the response of these regions to new conditions is then measured. A key limitation of this standard handpicked fROI method is the subjectivity of decisions about which clusters of activated voxels should be treated as the particular fROI in question in each subject. Here we apply the Group-Constrained Subject-Specific (GSS) method for defining fROIs, recently developed for identifying language fROIs (Fedorenko et al., 2010), to algorithmically identify fourteen well-studied category-selective regions of the ventral visual pathway (Kanwisher, 2010). We show that this method retains the benefit of defining fROIs in Manuscript Click here to view linked References

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has revealed a set of regions selectively engaged in visual scene processing: the parahippocampal place area (PPA); the retrosplenial complex (RSC); and a region around the transverse occipital sulcus (previously known as “TOS”), here renamed the “occipital place area” (OPA). Are these regions not only preferentially activated by, but also causally involved in scene perception? Although past neuropsychological data imply a causal role in scene processing for PPA and RSC, no such evidence exists for OPA. Thus, to test the causal role of OPA in human adults, we delivered transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to the right OPA (rOPA) or the nearby face-selective right occipital face area (rOFA) while participants performed fine-grained perceptual discrimination tasks on scenes or faces. TMS over rOPA impaired discrimination of scenes but not faces, while TMS over rOFA impaired discrimination of faces but not scenes. In a second experiment, we delivered TMS to rOPA, or the object-selective right lateral occipital complex (rLOC) while participants performed categorization tasks involving scenes and objects. TMS over rOPA impaired categorization accuracy of scenes but not objects, while TMS over rLOC impaired categorization accuracy of objects but not scenes. These findings provide the first evidence that OPA is causally involved in scene processing, and further show that this causal role is selective for scene perception. Our findings illuminate the functional architecture of the scene perception system, and also argue against the “distributed coding” view in which each category-selective region participates in the representation of all objects.