CAI Seminar: The navigating brain: Neural mechanisms underlying encoding of spatial environments
Event Details
- Date:
- Tuesday, 29 April 2014
- Time:
- 9:00 am - 10:00 am
- Room:
- Level 2 Seminar Room
- Location:
- CAI building 57 St Lucia
- Event category(s):
Event Contact
- Name:
- Dr Christopher Noble
- Phone:
- 60360
- Email:
- c.noble@uq.edu.au
- Org. Unit:
- Advanced Imaging
Event Description
- Full Description:
- Humans, like many animals, possess a remarkable ability to navigate their way to a desired but currently unobservable location using an internal representation of the external world. Neurophysiological studies in animals have greatly advanced our understanding of how this core cognitive function is implemented at the neuronal level. By contrast, the neural systems supporting spatial navigation in humans are less well understood.
In the last couple of years I have conducted a series of fMRI studies, which identified several key regions and mechanisms underlying spatial navigation in humans. For instance, we found that fMRI signals within the medial parietal cortex—specifically, Brodmann area 31—are modulated by learned heading, suggesting that this region contains neural populations involved in the encoding and retrieval of heading information in humans, akin to head-direction cells in rats. More recently, we showed that environmental size and complexity form part of the hippocampal representation of space, and that the spatial scale of an environment and its complexity are represented by different subregions, supporting the idea of information-rich but compartmentalized hippocampal representations of space.
The aim of my research is to advance the development of a comprehensive model of human spatial navigation that will account for several unanswered questions regarding how spatial representations of the environment are established, maintained, expanded and accessed in the human brain.
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