The cognitive map in humans: Spatial navigation and beyond
By Russell A. Epstein, E. Patai, Joshua B. Julian, Hugo J. Spiers. Nature Neuroscience, 2017
823 citations recorded by the source corpus.
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 suggest 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 yields 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, and (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 nonspatial domains to provide the building blocks for many core elements of human thought.
Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Automotive Engineering, Cognitive Neuroscience
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b7bc7ee8637f63779d843d17ebd648dfd2211085
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Citations in the corpus
- Robot Navigation in Constrained Pedestrian Environments using Reinforcement Learning (2020, neutral): “how humans perform spatial navigation tasks [25].”
- Learning Structures: Predictive Representations, Replay, and Generalization (2020, background): “Thus, prefrontal and entorhinal representations may compute and represent generalization and basis sets of structures, task sets, and schema [3,23,42].”
- Why AI is harder than we think (2021, background): “Research in neuroscience suggests, for example, that the neural structures controlling cognition are richly linked to those controlling sensory and motor systems, and that abstract thinking exploits body-based neural “maps” [68].”
- Navigating cognition: Spatial codes for human thinking (2018, methodology): “We used spatial navigation in rodents and humans (25, 38) as a model system to identify key neural mechanisms and fused them with concepts from cognitive science to describe the central neural coding machinery underlying higher-level cognition in humans.”