Distributed cognitive maps reflecting real distances between places and views in the human brain

Abstract

Keeping oriented in the environment is a multifaceted ability that requires knowledge of at least three pieces of information: one’s own location (“place”) and orientation (“heading”) within the environment, and which location in the environment one is looking at (“view”). We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in humans to examine the neural signatures of these information. Participants were scanned while viewing snapshots which varied for place, view and heading within a virtual room. We observed adaptation effects, proportional to the physical distances between consecutive places and views, in scene-responsive (retrosplenial complex and parahippocampal gyrus), fronto-parietal and lateral occipital regions. Multivoxel pattern classification of signals in scene-responsive regions and in the hippocampus allowed supra-chance decoding of place, view and heading, and revealed the existence of map-like representations, where places and views closer in physical space entailed activity patterns more similar in neural representational space. The pattern of hippocampal activity reflected both view- and place-based distances, the pattern of parahippocampal activity preferentially discriminated between views, and the pattern of retrosplenial activity combined place and view information, while the fronto-parietal cortex only showed transient effects of changes in place, view, and heading. Our findings provide evidence for the presence of map-like spatial representations which reflect metric distances in terms of both one’s own and landmark locations.

The dynamic contribution of the high‐level visual cortex to imagery and perception

“…Localizer scans were aimed at identifying scene‐ and face‐responsive regions in the HVC. In each imaging run, participants passively viewed eight alternating blocks (16 s) of photographs of faces and places/scenes presented for 300 ms every 500 ms, interleaved with fixation periods of 15 s on average (Boccia et al, ; Sulpizio, Committeri, & Galati, ; Sulpizio, Committeri, Lambrey, Berthoz, & Galati, ). During each localizer scan, we acquired 234 functional MR volumes.…”

Neural bases of self‐ and object‐motion in a naturalistic vision

“…For the train experiment and V6+ localizer scans we used a widefield setup similar to that originally described by our group (Pitzalis et al, 2006) and then routinely used in many fMRI experiment from our and other laboratories (Cardin & Smith, 2010;Huang et al, 2015;Huang & Sereno, 2013;Pitzalis et al, 2010;Pitzalis, Bozzacchi, et al, 2013;Pitzalis, Sdoia, et al, 2013;Pitzalis, Sereno, et al, 2013;Serra et al, 2019;Strappini et al, 2015Strappini et al, , 2017. Modified from Sulpizio et al (2013Sulpizio et al ( , 2014. The wide-field visual projection setup did not allow for eye tracking.…”

“…To check for the presence of motion responses in the sceneselective areas, we mapped PPA and RSC using an independent functional localizer following standard procedures as described in Section 2 (see Figure 3c) and in many previous papers (Epstein, 2008;Sulpizio et al, 2013Sulpizio et al, , 2014. Figure 9a shows the position of the two regions in the medial and ventral folded representation of the right and left hemispheres of the template brain.…”

Encoding of 3D head direction information in the human brain

“…We computed visual texture similarity using the model of Renninger and Malik (2004). This visual control model was used in previous studies that investigated direction encoding (Kim et al, 2017;Sulpizio, Committeri, & Galati, 2014;Vass & Epstein, 2013).…”