Space in the brain: how the hippocampal formation supports spatial cognition

Abstract

Over the past four decades, research has revealed that cells in the hippocampal formation provide an exquisitely detailed representation of an animal's current location and heading. These findings have provided the foundations for a growing understanding of the mechanisms of spatial cognition in mammals, including humans. We describe the key properties of the major categories of spatial cells: place cells, head direction cells, grid cells and boundary cells, each of which has a characteristic firing pattern that encodes spatial parameters relating to the animal's current position and orientation. These properties also include the theta oscillation, which appears to play a functional role in the representation and processing of spatial information. Reviewing recent work, we identify some themes of current research and introduce approaches to computational modelling that have helped to bridge the different levels of description at which these mechanisms have been investigated. These range from the level of molecular biology and genetics to the behaviour and brain activity of entire organisms. We argue that the neuroscience of spatial cognition is emerging as an exceptionally integrative field which provides an ideal test-bed for theories linking neural coding, learning, memory and cognition.

Memory and Space: Towards an Understanding of the Cognitive Map

“…The spatial view of hippocampal function was born out of the discovery of "place cells"-hippocampal neurons that fire when an animal moves through specific locations in an environment (O'Keefe and Dostrovsky, 1971). Subsequent studies have identified other types of spatial firing patterns of neurons in the neighboring entorhinal cortex and other areas, supporting the view that the hippocampal system creates maps of physical space and performs navigational computations (Moser et al, 2008;Hartley et al, 2014). Consensus between the memory and spatial views has been difficult because of differences in the species and approaches used-most experiments on memory involve the examination of declarative memory in humans, whereas most experiments on spatial cognition involve maze behavior in animals.…”

Effects of different delayed exercise regimens on cognitive performance in fimbria-fornix transected rats

“…Additional data does, indeed, support a significant role of the human hippocampal system in mediation of spatial orientation and related memory and cognition in general (e.g. Baumann and Mattingley 2014, Kaplan et al 2014, Boccia et al 2014, Ekstrom et al 2014, Hartley et al 2014.…”

Untitled

“…In the retina, for example, the space is encoded by "retinotopic" coordinates, in the parietal cortex the spatial coding is egocentric: its reference is the body of the observer. In hippocampus, spatial coding is allocentric, as a in a map (Hartley, Lever, Burgess, & O'Keefe, 2014). We ignore, for the most part, how the brain coordinates all these spaces and uses them to change the point of view.…”