ArticleThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2020
Distance and Direction Codes Underlie Navigation of a Novel Semantic Space in the Human Brain.
Article in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers.
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40 citing papers in PubMed.
- Semantic encoding of trauma memories in the hippocampus among individuals with PTSD.Neuropsychopharmacology : official publication of the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology · 2026Trial
- The human hippocampus can pattern separate memories by meaning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Protracted Maturation of Proactive and Reactive Systems Predicts Cognitive Stability and Psychopathology : A longitudinal multi-cohort study.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Action information is integrated into entorhinal representations of conceptual space and is reflected in eye movements.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Differential representations of spatial environments in mPFC and hippocampus underpinning flexible navigation.NeuroImage · 2026Article
- Manual pointing bias reflects spatial organization of number knowledge.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Task-relevant representational spaces in human memory traces.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Hippocampal-entorhinal cognitive maps and cortical motor system represent action plans and their outcomes.Nature communications · 2025Article
- A unified neural representation model for spatial and conceptual computations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Reduced temporal and spatial stability of neural activity patterns predict cognitive control deficits in children with ADHD.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Schemas, reinforcement learning and the medial prefrontal cortex.Nature reviews. Neuroscience · 2025Review
- Neural Representation Precision of Distance Predicts Children's Arithmetic Performance.Human brain mapping · 2025Article
- A double dissociation between semantic and spatial cognition in visual to default network pathways.eLife · 2025Article
- Distance and grid-like codes support the navigation of abstract social space in the human brain.eLife · 2024Article
- Reduced temporal and spatial stability of neural activity patterns predict cognitive control deficits in children with ADHD.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Spontaneous eye movements reflect the representational geometries of conceptual spaces.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- Neural patterns differentiate traumatic from sad autobiographical memories in PTSD.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- Representation of the inferred relationships in a map-like space.Human brain mapping · 2023Article
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2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A recent proposal posits that humans might use the same neuronal machinery to support the representation of both spatial and nonspatial information, organizing concepts and memories using spatial codes. This view predicts that the same neuronal coding schemes characterizing navigation in the physical space (tuned to distance and direction) should underlie navigation of abstract semantic spaces, even if they are categorical and labeled by symbols. We constructed an artificial semantic environment by parsing a bidimensional audiovisual object space into four labeled categories. Before and after a nonspatial symbolic categorization training, 25 adults (15 females) were presented with pseudorandom sequences of objects and words during a functional MRI session. We reasoned that subsequent presentations of stimuli (either objects or words) referring to different categories implied implicit movements in the novel semantic space, and that such movements subtended specific distances and directions. Using whole-brain fMRI adaptation and searchlight model-based representational similarity analysis, we found evidence of both distance-based and direction-based responses in brain regions typically involved in spatial navigation: the medial prefrontal cortex and the right entorhinal cortex (EHC). After training, both regions encoded the distances between concepts, making it possible to recover a faithful bidimensional representation of the semantic space directly from their multivariate activity patterns, whereas the right EHC also exhibited a periodic modulation as a function of traveled direction. Our results indicate that the brain regions and coding schemes supporting relations and movements between spatial locations in mammals are "recycled" in humans to represent a bidimensional multisensory conceptual space during a symbolic categorization task.
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