Anchoring the neural compass: coding of local spatial reference frames in human medial parietal lobe

Marchette, Steven A.; Vass, Lindsay K.; Ryan, Jack; Epstein, Russell A.

doi:10.1038/nn.3834

Cited by 256 publications

(399 citation statements)

References 59 publications

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“…As such, RSC responses have been shown to attenuate across multiple views of the same scene, suggesting that this region maintains information about the local environment across visual transformations [Marchette et al, 2014; Park and Chun, 2009]. This region also seems sensitive to landmark information by showing parametric increases in response to landmark “permanence” [Auger et al, 2012] and the size of visual scenes [Park et al, 2015], thus reinforcing the view that the RSC codes information that is relevant to navigation, such as allocentric spatial layout.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidencing a place for the hippocampus within the core scene processing network

Hodgetts

Shine

Lawrence

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

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Functional neuroimaging studies have identified several “core” brain regions that are preferentially activated by scene stimuli, namely posterior parahippocampal gyrus (PHG), retrosplenial cortex (RSC), and transverse occipital sulcus (TOS). The hippocampus (HC), too, is thought to play a key role in scene processing, although no study has yet investigated scene‐sensitivity in the HC relative to these other “core” regions. Here, we characterised the frequency and consistency of individual scene‐preferential responses within these regions by analysing a large dataset (n = 51) in which participants performed a one‐back working memory task for scenes, objects, and scrambled objects. An unbiased approach was adopted by applying independently‐defined anatomical ROIs to individual‐level functional data across different voxel‐wise thresholds and spatial filters. It was found that the majority of subjects had preferential scene clusters in PHG (max = 100% of participants), RSC (max = 76%), and TOS (max = 94%). A comparable number of individuals also possessed significant scene‐related clusters within their individually defined HC ROIs (max = 88%), evidencing a HC contribution to scene processing. While probabilistic overlap maps of individual clusters showed that overlap “peaks” were close to those identified in group‐level analyses (particularly for TOS and HC), inter‐individual consistency varied across regions and statistical thresholds. The inter‐regional and inter‐individual variability revealed by these analyses has implications for how scene‐sensitive cortex is localised and interrogated in functional neuroimaging studies, particularly in medial temporal lobe regions, such as the HC. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3779–3794, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Evidencing a place for the hippocampus within the core scene processing network

Hodgetts

Shine

Lawrence

et al. 2016

Human Brain Mapping

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“…In humans, neuroimaging and neuropsychological work suggests that place recognition is primarily mediated by the parahippocampal place area (PPA), a region of medial occipitotemporal cortex that responds strongly when subjects view environmental scenes or landmark objects (21-23), whereas heading retrieval is primarily mediated by a system centered around the retrosplenial complex (RSC) in the medial parietal lobe (24)(25)(26)(27)(28). Analogous to the current findings, the PPA appears to be sensitive to both geometric and nongeometric information (22,(29)(30)(31)(32)(33), whereas RSC appears to be especially sensitive to geometry when people retrieve spatial information from memory (28). In rodents, the homologous regions are postrhinal cortex (34), which has been shown to be important for place recognition (35), and retrosplenial cortex, which has been shown to be important for deriving directional information from environmental cues (36).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by dissociable cognitive systems in mice

Julian

Keinath

Muzzio

et al. 2015

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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A lost navigator must identify its current location and recover its facing direction to restore its bearings. We tested the idea that these two tasks-place recognition and heading retrieval-might be mediated by distinct cognitive systems in mice. Previous work has shown that numerous species, including young children and rodents, use the geometric shape of local space to regain their sense of direction after disorientation, often ignoring nongeometric cues even when they are informative. Notably, these experiments have almost always been performed in single-chamber environments in which there is no ambiguity about place identity. We examined the navigational behavior of mice in a two-chamber paradigm in which animals had to both recognize the chamber in which they were located (place recognition) and recover their facing direction within that chamber (heading retrieval). In two experiments, we found that mice used nongeometric features for place recognition, but simultaneously failed to use these same features for heading retrieval, instead relying exclusively on spatial geometry. These results suggest the existence of separate systems for place recognition and heading retrieval in mice that are differentially sensitive to geometric and nongeometric cues. We speculate that a similar cognitive architecture may underlie human navigational behavior.navigation | scene perception | spatial representation | geometry processing | neural specialization A navigator who becomes lost must solve two tasks to regain her bearings. First, she must identify her current location, a process we term place recognition. Second, she must identify her current facing direction, a process we term heading retrieval. These two tasks are logically dissociable from each other: A "you are here" map identifies location without revealing heading, whereas a compass reveals heading without identifying location. Neurophysiological work on rodents suggests that the outputs of these two processes are represented by distinct neural populations: Location is coded in the hippocampus, in both general terms (different environments elicit different hippocampal maps) and specific terms (place cells fire at specific coordinates within an environment), whereas heading is encoded by head direction (HD) cells in several structures including the postsubiculum, thalamus, and retrosplenial cortex (1-3). However, little is known about the systems that determine these quantities from perceptual inputs. In particular, it is not known whether place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by the same or different processing streams.Here, we use a novel behavioral paradigm to test the hypothesis that the mechanisms that mediate place recognition at the coarse level (i.e., identification of the current environment) in mice are dissociable from the mechanisms that mediate heading retrieval. We use a variant of a spatial reorientation task that has been used extensively to study navigation behavior in a variety of species, including rodents and human children (4-7...

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“…Damage in posterior parietal cortex is known to impair egocentric navigation and memory (Aguirre and D'Esposito, 1999;Wilson et al, 2005;Ciaramelli et al, 2010); and more recently, the imagined spatial locations and heading have been inferred from activation patterns in RSC (Marchette et al, 2014;Sulpizio et al, 2016). This is in agreement with the BBB model (Burgess et al, 2001a;Byrne et al, 2007), in which allocentric coordinates of the self-position in the hippocampus and landmark positions in the parahippocampus are converted into egocentric frames in retrospenial cortex, a hypothesis also supported by recent empirical evidence (Zhang et al, 2012;Dhindsa et al, 2014).…”

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confidence: 99%

Time Is Not Space: Core Computations and Domain-Specific Networks for Mental Travels

Gauthier

Wassenhove

2016

J. Neurosci.

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Humans can consciously project themselves in the future and imagine themselves at different places. Do mental time travel and mental space navigation abilities share common cognitive and neural mechanisms? To test this, we recorded fMRI while participants mentally projected themselves in time or in space (e.g., 9 years ago, in Paris) and ordered historical events from their mental perspective. Behavioral patterns were comparable for mental time and space and shaped by self-projection and by the distance of historical events to the mental position of the self, suggesting the existence of egocentric mapping in both dimensions. Nonetheless, self-projection in space engaged the medial and lateral parietal cortices, whereas self-projection in time engaged a widespread parietofrontal network. Moreover, while a large distributed network was found for spatial distances, temporal distances specifically engaged the right inferior parietal cortex and the anterior insula. Across these networks, a robust overlap was only found in a small region of the inferior parietal lobe, adding evidence for its role in domain-general egocentric mapping. Our findings suggest that mental travel in time or space capitalizes on egocentric remapping and on distance computation, which are implemented in distinct dimension-specific cortical networks converging in inferior parietal lobe.

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Anchoring the neural compass: coding of local spatial reference frames in human medial parietal lobe

Cited by 256 publications

References 59 publications

Evidencing a place for the hippocampus within the core scene processing network

Evidencing a place for the hippocampus within the core scene processing network

Place recognition and heading retrieval are mediated by dissociable cognitive systems in mice

Time Is Not Space: Core Computations and Domain-Specific Networks for Mental Travels

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