Segregating cognitive functions within hippocampal formation: A quantitative meta‐analysis on spatial navigation and episodic memory

Abstract

The most important cognitive domains where hippocampal formation is crucially involved are navigation and memory. Some evidence suggests that different hippocampal subregions mediate these domains. However, a quantitative meta-analysis on neuroimaging studies of spatial navigation versus memory is lacking. By means of activation likelihood estimation (ALE), we investigate concurrence of brain regions activated during spatial navigation encoding and retrieval as well as during episodic memory encoding and retrieval tasks in humans. During encoding in spatial navigation, activity was located in more posterior regions of the hippocampal formation, whereas episodic memory encoding was located in more anterior regions. Retrieval in spatial navigation was more strongly lateralized to the right compared to episodic memory retrieval. Within studies on spatial navigation retrieval, immediate recall was located more posterior and delayed recall more anterior. Overlap between concurrence of activation in spatial navigation and episodic memory was rather limited in comparison to uniquely involved regions. This argues in favor of two distinct networks, one for spatial navigation the other for episodic memory within the hippocampal formation.

Playing Super Mario induces structural brain plasticity: gray matter changes resulting from training with a commercial video game

“…11, 30 The consistent activation during retrieval of spatial information across several studies was located in close proximity to the region where structural change in HC was detected in this study: in right hippocampal body and tail and the adjacent parahippocampal gyrus.…”

Differences in navigation performance and postpartal striatal volume associated with pregnancy in humans

“…Interestingly, we also observed a negative correlation of prepartal estrogen with the hippocampal head. This part of the hippocampus has not been related to spatial, but rather (verbal) memory and emotional functions (Fanselow & Dong, 2010;Hackert et al, 2002;Kühn & Gallinat, 2014). Therefore, this finding could be interesting in light of (mostly verbal) memory deficits during pregnancy that have been observed in some of the previous investigations (Sharp, Brindle, Brown, & Turner, 1993), although we did not observe significant differences in (verbal) memory performance between the groups in the present study.…”

Hippocampal volume and functional connectivity changes during the female menstrual cycle

“…Schöning et al (2007) found a correlation between the activation of the superior parietal lobe during a mental rotation task and the serum estradiol concentration (Schöning et al, 2007). Interpreting the hippocampalparietal connectivity in connection to spatial processing seems plausible given that the hippocampus itself, especially the posterior part, is also involved in spatial processing (Kühn and Gallinat, 2014). Therefore, our finding of higher connectivity between the regions during highestrogen phases of the menstrual cycle is in line with previous behavioral results documenting cycle-dependent differences in performance on spatial tasks (McCormick and Teillon, 2001;Schöning et al, 2007;Silverman and Phillips, 1993).…”

“…Some studies observed performance differences over the menstrual cycle in tasks measuring spatial and verbal abilities as well as memory (Hampson, 1990;Hausmann et al, 2000;Maki et al, 2002;Rosenberg and Park, 2002), domains that are known to be related to hippocampal function (Kühn and Gallinat, 2014). However, some studies report no cyclerelated variations in performance on verbal and visuospatial tests (e.g., Epting and Overman, 1998;Gordon and Lee, 1993).…”