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SPATIAL NAVIGATION

Hexagonal pathfinding

Nature Reviews Neuroscience volume 19, page 713 (2018)Cite this article

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In all animals, spatial navigation involves building a neural representation of the environment in a process mediated by cells of the hippocampal formation, including grid cells. Human functional MRI studies have detected grid-like signals in the entorhinal cortex during visual exploration. Staudigl et al. investigated visual space encoding in 35 healthy people viewing natural scenes by simultaneously recording eye-tracking data and hippocampal activity (via magnetoencephalography (MEG) or intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG)). Both MEG and iEEG data indicated that visual space is encoded by grid-like hexadirectional modulation of activity in the high frequency range (60–120 Hz). In a separate study, Chen et al. focused on low frequency oscillations in the theta band (4–8 Hz), performing iEEG recordings from the entorhinal cortex in people with epilepsy while they performed a virtual object-location memory task. They found that changes in movement direction induced a hexadirectional rotational modulation of theta power, which stabilized over time and showed sensitivity to boundaries in the environment. Together, these studies suggest that both high frequency and theta band oscillations in the human entorhinal cortex code space in a grid-like manner.

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  1. Nature Reviews Neuroscience http://www.nature.com/nrn/

    Sian Lewis

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  1. Sian Lewis
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Correspondence to Sian Lewis.

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Lewis, S. Hexagonal pathfinding. Nat Rev Neurosci 19, 713 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-018-0084-2

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