ArticleHippocampus2019
Encoding of 3D head direction information in the human brain.
Article in Hippocampus, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 20 papers.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
20 citing papers in PubMed.
- Pathological tau alters head direction signaling and induces spatial disorientation.Cell reports · 2025Article
- Locomotion-dependent use of geometric and body cues in humans mapping 3D space.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- A Neural Compass in the Human Brain during Naturalistic Virtual Navigation.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2025Article
- Modeling hippocampal spatial cells in rodents navigating in 3D environments.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Electrophysiological signatures of veridical head direction in humans.Nature human behaviour · 2024Article
- A Review of Brain-Inspired Cognition and Navigation Technology for Mobile Robots.Cyborg and bionic systems (Washington, D.C.) · 2024Review
- Disentangling reference frames in the neural compass.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2024Article
- Paving the way to better understand the effects of prolonged spaceflight on operational performance and its neural bases.NPJ microgravity · 2023Review
- Time to retire the serial Papez circuit: Implications for space, memory, and attention.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2022Review
- A model of head direction and landmark coding in complex environments.PLoS computational biology · 2021Article
- Human brain dynamics in active spatial navigation.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Cross-species neuroscience: closing the explanatory gap.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Behavior-dependent directional tuning in the human visual-navigation network.Nature communications · 2020Article
- On the absence or presence of 3D tuned head direction cells in rats: a review and rebuttal.Journal of neurophysiology · 2020Review
- A gravity-based three-dimensional compass in the mouse brain.Nature communications · 2020Article
- The head direction cell network: attractor dynamics, integration within the navigation system, and three-dimensional properties.Current opinion in neurobiology · 2020Review
- Testing Navigation in Real Space: Contributions to Understanding the Physiology and Pathology of Human Navigation Control.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2020Article
- Encoding of 3D head direction information in the human brain.Hippocampus · 2019Article
- Can we study 3D grid codes non-invasively in the human brain? Methodological considerations and fMRI findings.NeuroImage · 2019Article
- Space and Memory (Far) Beyond the Hippocampus: Many Subcortical Structures Also Support Cognitive Mapping and Mnemonic Processing.Frontiers in neural circuits · 2019Review
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
Head direction cells are critical for navigation because they convey information about which direction an animal is facing within an environment. To date, most studies on head direction encoding have been conducted on a horizontal two-dimensional (2D) plane, and little is known about how three-dimensional (3D) direction information is encoded in the brain despite humans and other animals living in a 3D world. Here, we investigated head direction encoding in the human brain while participants moved within a virtual 3D "spaceship" environment. Movement was not constrained to planes and instead participants could move along all three axes in volumetric space as if in zero gravity. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) multivoxel pattern similarity analysis, we found evidence that the thalamus, particularly the anterior portion, and the subiculum encoded the horizontal component of 3D head direction (azimuth). In contrast, the retrosplenial cortex was significantly more sensitive to the vertical direction (pitch) than to the azimuth. Our results also indicated that vertical direction information in the retrosplenial cortex was significantly correlated with behavioral performance during a direction judgment task. Our findings represent the first evidence showing that the "classic" head direction system that has been identified on a horizontal 2D plane also seems to encode vertical and horizontal heading in 3D space in the human brain.
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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.