ReviewNature neuroscience2017
Our sense of direction: progress, controversies and challenges.
Review in Nature neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 108 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
108 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Common and specific activations supporting optic flow processing and navigation as revealed by a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies.Brain structure & function · 2024Pooled it
- Evidence for cognitive impairment in patients with vestibular disorders.Journal of neurology · 2022Pooled it
- Egocentric and Allocentric Spatial Memory in Mild Cognitive Impairment with Real-World and Virtual Navigation Tasks: A Systematic Review.Journal of Alzheimer's disease : JAD · 2021Pooled it
- Galvanic vestibular stimulation promotes visuospatial cognitive recovery in acute unilateral vestibulopathy via targeted neural modulation: a randomized controlled trial.Journal of translational medicine · 2025Trial
- A self-organizing developmental framework for the head direction ring attractor.Journal of computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Optokinetic stimulation modulates vestibular contribution to postural control.The Journal of physiology · 2026Article
- Central complex representations of self-movement are sufficient to compute wind direction in flight.Science advances · 2026Article
- The parafascicular thalamus steers attention to facilitate learning.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Type I hair cells of striolar and central zones in vestibular organs are essential for head stability and postural control.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- A hemispheric decoding principle for vestibular heading perception in the posterior sylvian area.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
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- Spatial Cognition in the Field: A New Approach Using the Smartphone's Compass Sensors and Navigation Apps.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Precerebellar paramedian tract cell group connections: II. Abducens internuclear inputs.Brain structure & function · 2025Article
- Visual motion and landmark position align with heading direction in the zebrafish interpeduncular nucleus.Nature communications · 2025Article
- The head-direction signal is generated from two types of head direction cells in brainstem nuclei.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Multisensory coding of self-motion and its contribution to navigation.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Inter- and intrahemispheric sources of vestibular signals to V1.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Cell-type-specific cholinergic control of granular retrosplenial cortex with implications for angular velocity coding across brain states.Progress in neurobiology · 2025Article
- Cannabinoid overrides triggers of GABAergic plasticity in vestibular circuits and distorts the development of navigation.iScience · 2025Article
48 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
In this Perspective, we evaluate current progress in understanding how the brain encodes our sense of direction, within the context of parallel work focused on how early vestibular pathways encode self-motion. In particular, we discuss how these systems work together and provide evidence that they involve common mechanisms. We first consider the classic view of the head direction cell and results of recent experiments in rodents and primates indicating that inputs to these neurons encode multimodal information during self-motion, such as proprioceptive and motor efference copy signals, including gaze-related information. We also consider the paradox that, while the head-direction network is generally assumed to generate a fixed representation of perceived directional heading, this computation would need to be dynamically updated when the relationship between voluntary motor command and its sensory consequences changes. Such situations include navigation in virtual reality and head-restricted conditions, since the natural relationship between visual and extravisual cues is altered.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.