Environmental deformations dynamically shift human spatial memory.

ABSTRACT: Place and grid cells in the hippocampal formation are commonly thought to support a unified and coherent cognitive map of space. This mapping mechanism faces a challenge when a navigator is placed in a familiar environment that has been deformed from its original shape. Under such circumstances, many transformations could plausibly serve to map a navigator's familiar cognitive map to the deformed space. Previous empirical results indicate that the firing fields of rodent place and grid cells stretch or compress in a manner that approximately matches the environmental deformation, and human spatial memory exhibits similar distortions. These effects have been interpreted as evidence that reshaping a familiar environment elicits an analogously reshaped cognitive map. However, recent work has

SUBMITTER: Keinath AT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8293620 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature