Navigation and spatial memory: New brain region identified to be involved. Navigation in mammals including humans and rodents depends on specialized neural networks that encode the animal's location and trajectory in the environment, serving essentially as a GPS, findings that led to the 2014 Nobel Prize in Medicine.
Failure of these networks to function properly, as seen in Alzheimer's disease and other neurological conditions, results in severe disorientation and memory deficits. Researchers at NERF (VIB-imec-KU Leuven) have now uncovered striking neural activity patterns in a brain area called the retrosplenial cortex that may assist with spatial memory and navigation. The prime example of spatial information coding is the firing of so called place cells in the hippocampus, a brain area known for its role in navigation and memory formation.
Place cells fire when an animal enters a specific place in its environment. At any given location, only a small fraction of place cells is active, leaving the remaining neurons largely silent. Ventral Stream Areas. Visual recognition areas in human temporal cortex (Kanwisher, Downing, Epstein & Kourtzi (2001).
Functional neuroimaging of visual recogntion. In Cabeza & Kingstone, Handbook of Funcitonal Neuroimaging of Cognition. Cambridge MA: MIT Press) Lateral Occipital Complex (LO or LOC) Hippocampal place cells recorded in the Wilson lab at MIT. Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activity evoked by natural movies - GallantLabUCB. Brain. Welcome to the pycortex WebGL MRI viewer!
This viewer shows how information about thousands of object and action categories is represented across human neocortex. The data come from brain activity measurements made using fMRI while a participant watched hours of movie trailers.