A navigational guidance system in the human brain

Abstract

Finding your way in large-scale space requires knowing where you currently are and how to get to your goal destination. While much is understood about the neural basis of one's current position during navigation, surprisingly little is known about how the human brain guides navigation to goals. Computational accounts argue that specific brain regions support navigational guidance by coding the proximity and direction to the goal, but empirical evidence for such mechanisms is lacking. Here, we scanned subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging as they navigated to goal destinations in a highly accurate virtual simulation of a real city. Brain activity was then analyzed in combination with metric measures of proximity and direction to goal destinations that were derived from each individual subject's coordinates at every second of navigation. We found that activity in the medial prefrontal cortex was positively correlated, and activity in a right subicular/entorhinal region was negatively correlated with goal proximity. By contrast, activity in bilateral posterior parietal cortex was correlated with egocentric direction to goals. Our results provide empirical evidence for a navigational guidance system in the human brain, and define more precisely the contribution of these three brain regions to human navigation. In addition, these findings may also have wider implications for how the brain monitors and integrates different types of information in the service of goal-directed behavior in general.

Heading‐vector navigation based on head‐direction cells and path integration

“…Behavioral studies in humans support the proposition that navigation is based on heading vectors rather than step-by-step movement along a path of identifiable locations (Wang and Spelke, 2002;Waller and Haun, 2003;Muehl and Sholl, 2004;Spiers and Maguire, 2007). For example, Bailenson et al (2000) found that, given a choice between equal-distance routes between two points, subjects reliably chose the route whose initial segment direction was closer to the global vector to the goal.…”

Keeping the route and speaking coherently: The hidden link between spatial navigation and discourse processing

“…As we have seen in the previous section, the generation of an allocentric (world-centered) representation of locations -a cognitive map -is a key process in spatial navigation. However, while knowledge of spatial environment is clearly crucial, the primary purpose of navigation is to reach specific locations or goals (a final destination or intermediate landmarks) that are the raison d'être of navigation (Spiers & Maguire, 2007). From this point of view, spatial navigation may be described as a specific case of a more general goal-oriented behavior.…”

Anterior Hippocampus and Goal-Directed Spatial Decision Making

“…Both regions are activated by way-finding compared with processing static scenes (Maguire et al, 1998) or route-following (Hartley et al, 2003). The PPC has also been associated with spatial planning (Spiers and Maguire, 2006) and activity there correlates with egocentric distance to the goal (Spiers and Maguire, 2007). Animal studies reveal neurons in medial parietal areas that respond to the position of stimuli in allocentric space (Galletti et al, 1993;Dean and Platt, 2006), whereas neurons in the more lateral intraparietal sulcus respond to combinations of egocentric and allocentric locations (Andersen et al, 1985;Snyder et al, 1998) and to the animal's position along a trajectory (Nitz, 2006).…”