A Neural Compass in the Human Brain during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation.

ABSTRACT: A central component of wayfinding is the ability to maintain a consistent representation of one's facing direction (FD) when moving about the world. In rodents, head direction cells are believed to support this "neural compass," but identifying a similar mechanism in humans during dynamic naturalistic navigation has been challenging. To address this issue, we acquired fMRI data from male and female human participants while they freely navigated through a virtual reality city. Encoding model analyses revealed voxel clusters in the posterior-medial cortex (the "retrosplenial complex") and superior parietal lobule that exhibited reliable tuning as a function of FD. Crucially, these directional tunings were consistent across perceptually different versions of the city, spatially separated loca

SUBMITTER: Lu Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12369924 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature