Environmental Barriers Disrupt Grid-like Representations in Humans during Navigation

He, Qiliang; Brown, Thackery I.

doi:10.1016/j.cub.2019.06.072

Cited by 41 publications

(38 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…Consistently with rodent data 63 , it has recently been demonstrated that physical restrictions of navigation possibilities in the environment (e.g. by physical spatial constraints) disrupt the hexadirectional GCLR modulation in humans 64 . By such restrictions, firing fields of grid cells do not tile in typical hexagonal grids, reflecting a change of navigational processing corresponding to the dimensions of the navigation corridor.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Sense of self impacts spatial navigation and hexadirectional coding in human entorhinal cortex

Moon

Gauthier

Park

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Grid cells in entorhinal cortex (EC) encode an individual's location in space and rely on environmental cues and self-motion cues derived from the individual's body. Body-derived signals are also primary signals for the sense of self as located in space (i.e. bodily self-consciousness, BSC). However, it is currently unknown whether BSC impacts grid cell activity and how such changes relate to experimental modulations of BSC. Integrating BSC with a spatial navigation task and an fMRI measure to detect grid cell-like representation (GCLR) in humans, we report a robust GCLR modulation in EC when participants navigated during an enhanced BSC state. These changes were further associated with improved spatial navigation performance and increased activity in posterior parietal and retrosplenial cortex. These data link entorhinal grid cell activity with BSC and show that BSC modulates ego- versus allocentric spatial processes about an individual's location in space in a distributed spatial navigation system.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 69%

Sense of self impacts spatial navigation and hexadirectional coding in human entorhinal cortex

Moon

Gauthier

Park

et al. 2020

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…This effect of the environment layout on spatial ability echoes recent studies showing that environmental barriers (e.g. streets) compartmentalize humans' cognitive map, disrupting the way spatial information is encoded in the entorhinal cortex [46,47]. We quantified game level's entropy in the same way as for the cities (see Methods), which only captures a facet of level's complexity.…”

Section: Limitations and Analysis Considerationsmentioning

confidence: 54%

Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability

Coutrot

Manley

Goodroe

et al. 2020

Preprint

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Cultural and geographical properties of the environment have been shown to deeply influence cognition and mental health. However, how the environment experienced during early life impacts later cognitive abilities remains poorly understood. Here, we used a cognitive task embedded in a video game to measure non-verbal spatial navigation ability in 442,195 people from 38 countries across the world. We found that on average, people who reported having grown up in cities have worse navigation skills than those who grew-up outside cities, even when controlling for age, gender, and level of education. The negative impact of cities was stronger in countries with low average Street Network Entropy, i.e. whose cities have a griddy layout. The effect was smaller in countries with more complex, organic cities. This evidences the impact of the environment on human cognition on a global scale, and highlights the importance of urban design on human cognition and brain function.

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“…We previously showed that many implementation-level predictions of this model were borne out in existing rodent grid cell data sets (Keinath et al, 2018). Neuroimaging and neural recording data have established the existence of a grid cell network in humans with striking representational parallels to the networks observed in rodents (Doeller, Barry, & Burgess, 2010;He & Brown, 2019;Jacobs et al, 2013;Julian, Keinath, Frazzetta, & Epstein, 2018;Kunz et al, 2019), including the appearance of rescaling (Nadasdy et al, 2017). Thus, it is possible that dynamic shifts in grid phase directly mediate boundaryanchored shifts in human spatial memory.…”

Section: Experiments 3: Immersive Virtual Environment With Full Visumentioning

confidence: 98%

Environmental deformations dynamically shift human spatial memory

et al. 2020

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Place and grid cells in the hippocampal formation are commonly thought to support a unified and coherent cognitive map of space. This mapping mechanism faces a challenge when a navigator is placed in a familiar environment that has been deformed from its original shape. Under such circumstances, many transformations could plausibly serve to map a navigator's familiar cognitive map to the deformed space. Previous empirical results indicate that the firing fields of rodent place and grid cells stretch or compress in a manner that approximately matches the environmental deformation, and human spatial memory exhibits similar distortions. These effects have been interpreted as evidence that reshaping a familiar environment elicits an analogously reshaped cognitive map. However, recent work has suggested an alternative explanation, whereby deformation-induced distortions of the grid code are attributable to a mechanism that dynamically anchors grid fields to the most recently experienced boundary, thus causing history-dependent shifts in grid phase. This interpretation raises the possibility that human spatial memory will exhibit similar history-dependent dynamics. To test this prediction, we taught participants the locations of objects in a virtual environment and then probed their memory for these locations in deformed versions of this environment. Across three experiments with variable access to visual and vestibular cues, we observed the predicted pattern, whereby the remembered locations of objects were shifted from trial to trial depending on the boundary of origin of the participant's movement trajectory. These results provide evidence for a dynamic anchoring mechanism that governs both neuronal firing and spatial memory.

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Environmental Barriers Disrupt Grid-like Representations in Humans during Navigation

Cited by 41 publications

References 29 publications

Sense of self impacts spatial navigation and hexadirectional coding in human entorhinal cortex

Sense of self impacts spatial navigation and hexadirectional coding in human entorhinal cortex

Entropy of city street networks linked to future spatial navigation ability

Environmental deformations dynamically shift human spatial memory

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