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

The neural systems that code for location and facing direction during spatial navigation have been investigated extensively; however, the mechanisms by which these quantities are referenced to external features of the world are not well understood. To address this issue, we examined behavioral priming and functional magnetic resonance imaging activity patterns while human subjects recalled spatial views from a recently learned virtual environment. Behavioral results indicated that imagined location and facing direction were represented during this task, and multivoxel pattern analyses indicated that the retrosplenial complex (RSC) was the anatomical locus of these spatial codes. Critically, in both cases, location and direction were defined on the basis of fixed elements of the local environment and generalized across geometrically similar local environments. These results suggest that RSC anchors internal spatial representations to local topographical features, thus allowing us to stay oriented while we navigate and retrieve from memory the experience of being in a particular place.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Nature Neuroscience

• Publication date

  2014-10-05

• Fields of study

  Biology, Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1038/nn.3834PMID 25282616PMCID 4309016
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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