ArticleCurrent biology : CB2021
The human brain uses spatial schemas to represent segmented environments.
Article in Current biology : CB, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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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
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- The effect of spatial boundaries on memory in a virtual environment.Memory & cognition · 2026Article
- Egocentric Dominance in Spatial Representations: The Role of Environmental Familiarity in Building Cognitive Maps.Brain and behavior · 2026Article
- Three-dimensional scene boundary representations for wall orientation and distance are represented distinctly in the human visual cortex.PLoS biology · 2026Article
- Graded encoding of spatial novelty scales in the human brain.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2025Article
- Representational similarity analysis reveals cue-independent spatial representations for landmarks and self-motion cues in human retrosplenial cortex.Imaging neuroscience (Cambridge, Mass.) · 2025Article
- Complexity Matters: Normalization to Prototypical Viewpoint Induces Memory Distortion along the Vertical Axis of Scenes.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2024Article
- The format of the cognitive map depends on the structure of the environment.Journal of experimental psychology. General · 2024Article
- Improved Navigation Performance Through Memory Triggering Maps: AKN - journal of cartography and geographic information · 2024Review
- Differential involvement of the anterior and posterior hippocampus, parahippocampus, and retrosplenial cortex in making precise judgments of spatial distance and object size for remotely acquired memories of environments and objects.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Generalization of cognitive maps across space and time.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2023Article
- Review
- Neural basis of topographical disorientation in the primate posterior cingulate gyrus based on a labeled graph.AIMS neuroscience · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Humans and animals use cognitive maps to represent the spatial structure of the environment. Although these maps are typically conceptualized as extending in an equipotential manner across known space, psychological evidence suggests that people mentally segment complex environments into subspaces. To understand the neurocognitive mechanisms behind this operation, we familiarized participants with a virtual courtyard that was divided into two halves by a river; we then used behavioral testing and fMRI to understand how spatial locations were encoded within this environment. Participants' spatial judgments and multivoxel activation patterns were affected by the division of the courtyard, indicating that the presence of a boundary can induce mental segmentation even when all parts of the environment are co-visible. In the hippocampus and occipital place area (OPA), the segmented organization of the environment manifested in schematic spatial codes that represented geometrically equivalent locations in the two subspaces as similar. In the retrosplenial complex (RSC), responses were more consistent with an integrated spatial map. These results demonstrate that people use both local spatial schemas and integrated spatial maps to represent segmented environment. We hypothesize that schematization may serve as a general mechanism for organizing complex knowledge structures in terms of their component elements.
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