Goal-oriented representations in the human hippocampus during planning and navigation

Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience has suggested that the hippocampus might support planning, imagination, and navigation by forming cognitive maps that capture the abstract structure of physical spaces, tasks, and situations. Navigation involves disambiguating similar contexts, and t...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Nature communications 2023-05, Vol.14 (1), p.2946-2946, Article 2946
Main Authors: Crivelli-Decker, Jordan, Clarke, Alex, Park, Seongmin A., Huffman, Derek J., Boorman, Erie D., Ranganath, Charan
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
59/36
631/378/2649
631/477/2811
Activity patterns
Cognitive ability
Cognitive maps
Context
Goals
Hippocampus
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Imagination
Information retrieval
multidisciplinary
Navigation
Nervous system
Neurosciences
Planning
Prospective Studies
Science
Science (multidisciplinary)
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience has suggested that the hippocampus might support planning, imagination, and navigation by forming cognitive maps that capture the abstract structure of physical spaces, tasks, and situations. Navigation involves disambiguating similar contexts, and the planning and execution of a sequence of decisions to reach a goal. Here, we examine hippocampal activity patterns in humans during a goal-directed navigation task to investigate how contextual and goal information are incorporated in the construction and execution of navigational plans. During planning, hippocampal pattern similarity is enhanced across routes that share a context and a goal. During navigation, we observe prospective activation in the hippocampus that reflects the retrieval of pattern information related to a key-decision point. These results suggest that, rather than simply representing overlapping associations or state transitions, hippocampal activity patterns are shaped by context and goals. Several lines of evidence suggest the hippocampus plays a key role in navigation. Here, the authors show that during navigation hippocampal patterns represent context-specific, goal-oriented information.
ISSN:2041-1723
2041-1723
DOI:10.1038/s41467-023-35967-6