Navigating from hippocampus to parietal cortex

Whitlock, Jonathan R.; Sutherland, Robert J.; Witter, Menno P.; Moser, May‐Britt; Moser, Edvard I

doi:10.1073/pnas.0804216105

Cited by 228 publications

(206 citation statements)

References 111 publications

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“…There is a vast literature indicating that besides the hippocampus, other brain structures, such as the precuneus, posterior parietal cortex, inferior occipital cortex, and parahippocampus, play an important role in spatial cognitive mapping. For instance, "place cells," traditionally believed to exist exclusively in the hippocampus (6), are also found in the parahippocampus and in the parietal cortex (22). The parahippocampus in primates also contains "spatial view" cells (i.e., cells that respond when looking at a part of the environment) (23).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The significance level was set to P < 0.01, FDR-corrected for multiple comparisons. For direct statistical comparison of activation maps in blind and blindfolded sighted controls, we tested for significant activation within areas of interest based on previous studies, including the hippocampus, parahippocampus, ventral visual cortex, cuneus, precuneus, and posterior parietal cortex (12,22,25). For each area, we corrected the peak activation voxel for multiple comparisons within a 10-mm radius sphere using Gaussian random field theory (52).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Neural correlates of virtual route recognition in congenital blindness

Kupers

Chebat

Madsen

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

131

133

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Despite the importance of vision for spatial navigation, blind subjects retain the ability to represent spatial information and to move independently in space to localize and reach targets. However, the neural correlates of navigation in subjects lacking vision remain elusive. We therefore used functional MRI (fMRI) to explore the cortical network underlying successful navigation in blind subjects. We first trained congenitally blind and blindfolded sighted control subjects to perform a virtual navigation task with the tongue display unit (TDU), a tactile-to-vision sensory substitution device that translates a visual image into electrotactile stimulation applied to the tongue. After training, participants repeated the navigation task during fMRI. Although both groups successfully learned to use the TDU in the virtual navigation task, the brain activation patterns showed substantial differences. Blind but not blindfolded sighted control subjects activated the parahippocampus and visual cortex during navigation, areas that are recruited during topographical learning and spatial representation in sighted subjects. When the navigation task was performed under full vision in a second group of sighted participants, the activation pattern strongly resembled the one obtained in the blind when using the TDU. This suggests that in the absence of vision, cross-modal plasticity permits the recruitment of the same cortical network used for spatial navigation tasks in sighted subjects.cross-modal plasticity | parahippocampus | sensory substitution | spatial navigation | visual cortex T he ability to navigate efficiently in large-scale environments was always a predicate for human survival, now applied to the particular challenges of living in a modern, urban society. Visual cues signaling the location of landmarks play a key role in facilitating the formation of spatial cognitive maps used for path finding in a visual setting (1, 2). Despite the importance of vision in spatial cognition, the abilities to recognize a traveled route and to represent spatial information are maintained in blind individuals (3-5), probably through tactile, auditory, and olfactory cues, as well as motion-related cues arising from the vestibular and proprioceptive systems.During successful navigation, spatial information needs to be encoded and retrieved. The role of the hippocampus for navigation in large-scale environments has been amply demonstrated in both animal (6-8) and human studies (9-11). Besides the hippocampus, several other areas in the posterior mesial lobe and posterior parietal, occipital, and infero-temporal cortices also play an important role in navigation (9,(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)(17).The neural correlates of navigation in congenital blindness remain elusive, in part owing to the difficulty in testing navigational skills of blind subjects within the setting of a functional brain imaging study. To circumvent this difficulty, we trained blind and sighted subjects in a spatial navigation task using the tongue display unit (TDU), a vis...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Neural correlates of virtual route recognition in congenital blindness

Kupers

Chebat

Madsen

et al. 2010

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

131

133

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…As noted above, with time and movement, path integration coordinates are progressively degraded by the accumulation of errors (Etienne & Jeffery, 2004), and animals must regularly update their position in the environment using a stable environmental cue (be it visual, olfactory or tactile) in order to maintain coherence between the path integrator and the real world. Indeed, it has been shown in both the hippocampus and the medial entorhinal cortex (where path integration coding may originate) that neurons normally driven by self-motion are nonetheless responsive to the displacement of distal visual cues (see Whitlock, Sutherland, Witter, Moser, & Moser, 2008 for a review), demonstarting the highly inter-related nature of the path integration and allocentric spatial systems. Previous experiments tested path integration in young children following simple rotation and translation movements in which children were never removed from the immediate testing environment, and the time between viewing and searching was relatively short (5-10 s), likely allowing the path integrator to remain reliable (Acredolo, Pick, & Olsen, 1975;Acredolo et al, 1984;Newcombe et al, 1998;Rieser & Heiman, 1982).…”

Section: Task Specificitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Development of allocentric spatial memory abilities in children from 18 months to 5 years of age

Ribordy¹,

Jabès²,

Lavenex³

et al. 2013

Cognitive Psychology

147

130

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Episodic memories for autobiographical events that happen in unique spatiotemporal contexts are central to defining who we are. Yet, before 2 years of age, children are unable to form or store episodic memories for recall later in life, a phenomenon known as infantile amnesia. Here, we studied the development of allocentric spatial memory, a fundamental component of episodic memory, in two versions of a real-world memory task requiring 18 month-to 5-year-old children to search for rewards hidden beneath cups distributed in an open-field arena. Whereas children 25-42-months-old were not capable of discriminating three reward locations among 18 possible locations in absence of local cues marking these locations, children older than 43 months found the reward locations reliably. These results support previous findings suggesting that allocentric spatial memory, if present, is only rudimentary in children under 3.5 years of age. However, when tested with only one reward location among four possible locations, children 25-39-months-old found the reward reliably in absence of local cues, whereas 18-23-month-olds did not. Our findings thus show that the ability to form a basic allocentric representation of the environment is present by 2 years of age, and its emergence coincides temporally with the offset of infantile amnesia. However, the ability of children to distinguish and remember closely related spatial locations improves from 2 to 3.5 years of age, a developmental period marked by persistent deficits in long-term episodic E-mail address: pierre.lavenex@unifr.ch (P. Lavenex).memory known as childhood amnesia. These findings support the hypothesis that the differential maturation of distinct hippocampal circuits contributes to the emergence of specific memory processes during early childhood.

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“…An alternative set of routes includes the posterior parietal cortex, which in headrestrained primates has a pivotal role in preparing and guiding movement towards proximal targets (Andersen and Buneo, 2002). This region of cortex may be responsible for the translation of a world-centered spatial representation of self-location, possibly generated in the entorhinal cortex, to a set of body-centered reference frames needed for bringing the animal to a particular goal location (Whitlock et al, 2008b). Lesions of the rat homolog of the posterior parietal cortex cause severe impairment in the ability to navigate back to a refuge under conditions where the return pathway can only be computed on the basis of the animal's own movement (Save et al, 2001;Parron and Save, 2004).…”

Section: The Extended Mapmentioning

confidence: 99%

A metric for space

2008

Self Cite

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ABSTRACT:Not all areas of neuronal systems investigation have matured to the stage where computation can be understood at the microcircuit level. In mammals, insights into cortical circuit functions have been obtained for the early stages of sensory systems, where signals can be followed through networks of increasing complexity from the receptors to the primary sensory cortices. These studies have suggested how neurons and neuronal networks extract features from the external world, but how the brain generates its own codes, in the higher-order nonsensory parts of the cortex, has remained deeply mysterious. In this terra incognita, a path was opened by the discovery of grid cells, place-modulated entorhinal neurons whose firing locations define a periodic triangular or hexagonal array covering the entirety of the animal's available environment. This array of firing is maintained in spite of ongoing changes in the animal's speed and direction, suggesting that grid cells are part of the brain's metric for representation of space. Because the crystal-like structure of the firing fields is created within the nervous system itself, grid cells may provide scientists with direct access to some of the most basic operational principles of cortical circuits. V

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Navigating from hippocampus to parietal cortex

Cited by 228 publications

References 111 publications

Neural correlates of virtual route recognition in congenital blindness

Neural correlates of virtual route recognition in congenital blindness

Development of allocentric spatial memory abilities in children from 18 months to 5 years of age

A metric for space

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