Cognitive Neuroscience of Spatial Cognition

Cognitive neuroscience is a relatively new direction for the lab that is being lead by a postdoctoral fellow, Thomas Wolbers. While we have used cognitive neuroscience methods to study processes such as mental rotation and perspective taking (Keehner et al., 2006; Wolbers et al., 2003, 2006) our current cognitive neuroscience work is focused on processes involved in spatial navigation. For example, path integration, the ability to sense self-motion for keeping track of changes in orientation and position, constitutes a fundamental mechanism of spatial navigation. It allows humans and animals to find novel shortcuts and to return to their origin of travel via a direct path, even after long, winding excursions. In sharp contrast to the abundant information available on rodents, the neural foundations of path integration are not well understood in humans. Therefore, we have started a series of experiments that combine functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and navigation in interactive virtual environments. Initial findings have revealed visual path integration to be tightly linked to the dynamic interplay of self-motion processing in area MST, higher-level spatial processes in the hippocampus and spatial working memory in medial prefrontal cortex (Wolbers et al., under review).

Path integration is also a keystone for the development of cognitive maps. In previous studies we have characterized the neural systems mediating the gradual acquisition of route and survey knowledge from ground-level navigation (Wolbers et al., 2004; Wolbers & Büchel, 2005). Whereas retrosplenial cortex was shown to integrate egocentric spatial information with path integration signals, the hippocampus appears to incorporate highly processed spatial information into emerging survey representations. Future studies will help to determine how specific features of the environment affect the contribution of these and other critical structures in the human brain.

Publications

Wolbers, T., Hegarty, M. Büchel, C., & Loomis, J. (in press). How the brain keeps track of changing object locations during observer motion. Nature Neuroscience. [PDF]

Wolbers, T.; Wiener, J.M.; Mallot, H.A. & Büchel, C. (2007). Differential Recruitment of the Hippocampus, Medial
Prefrontal Cortex, and the Human Motion Complex during Path Integration in Humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 27, 9408-9416. [PDF]

Keehner, M. Guerin, S. Miller, M. Turk, D, & Hegarty, M. (2006). Modulation of neural activity by angle of rotation during imagined spatial transformations. Neuroimage, 33, 391-398. [PDF]

Wolbers, T.; Schoell, E. & Büchel, C. (2006). The predictive value of white matter organization in posterior parietal cortex for spatial visualization ability. NeuroImage, 32(3), 1450-1455.[PDF]

Wolbers, T.; Schoell, E.; Verleger, R.; Kraft, S.; McNamara, A.; Jaskowski, P. & Büchel, C. (2006). Changes in connectivity profiles as a mechanism for strategic control over interfering subliminal information. Cerebral Cortex, 16, 857-864. [PDF]

van Eimeren, T.; Wolbers, T.; Münchau, A.; Büchel, C.; Weiller, C. & Siebner, H. (2006). Implementation of spatial cues into the volitional selection of action. NeuroImage, 29, 286-294.

Wolbers, T. & Büchel, C. (2005). Dissociable retrosplenial and hippocampal contributions to successful formation of survey representations. Journal of Neuroscience, 25, 3333-3340. [PDF]

Sommer, T.; Rose, M., Gläscher, J.; Wolbers, T. & Büchel, C. (2005). Dissociable contributions within the medial temporal lobe to encoding of object-location associations. Learning and Memory, 12, 343-351.

Wolbers, T.; Weiller, C. & Büchel, C. (2004). Neural foundations of emerging route knowledge in complex spatial environments. Cognitive Brain Research, 21, 401-411. [PDF]

Wolbers, T.; Weiller, C. & Büchel, C. (2003). Contralateral coding of imagined body parts in the superior parietal lobe. Cerebral Cortex, 13, 392-399. [PDF]

Department of Psychology • University of California, Santa Barbara
Contact Mary Hegarty with questions. Created and maintained by Drew Dara-Abrams.