Hao Xin, Huang Yi, Song Yiying, Kong Xiangzhen, Liu Jia
State Key Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience and Learning, IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing Normal UniversityBeijing, China.
Department of Psychology, Tsinghua UniversityBeijing, China.
Front Psychol. 2017 Jul 11;8:1166. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01166. eCollection 2017.
The coordinate system has been proposed as a fundamental and cross-culturally used spatial representation, through which people code location and direction information in the environment. Here we provided direct evidence demonstrating that daily experience with the cardinal coordinate system (i.e., east, west, north, and south) contributed to the representation of cognitive maps. Behaviorally, we found that individuals who relied more on the cardinal coordinate system for daily navigation made smaller errors in an indoor pointing task, suggesting that the cardinal coordinate system is an important element of cognitive maps. Neurally, the extent to which individuals relied on the cardinal coordinate system was positively correlated with the gray matter volume of the entorhinal cortex, suggesting that the entorhinal cortex may serve as the neuroanatomical basis of coordinate-based navigation (the entorhinal coordinate area, ECA). Further analyses on the resting-state functional connectivity revealed that the intrinsic interaction between the ECA and two hippocampal sub-regions, the subiculum and cornu ammonis, might be linked with the representation precision of cognitive maps. In sum, our study reveals an association between daily experience with the cardinal coordinate system and cognitive maps, and suggests that the ECA works in collaboration with hippocampal sub-regions to represent cognitive maps.
坐标系被认为是一种基本的、跨文化使用的空间表征，人们通过它来编码环境中的位置和方向信息。在此，我们提供了直接证据，证明日常对基本坐标系（即东、西、北、南）的体验有助于认知地图的表征。在行为方面，我们发现，在日常导航中更多依赖基本坐标系的个体在室内指向任务中犯的错误更少，这表明基本坐标系是认知地图的一个重要元素。在神经层面，个体依赖基本坐标系的程度与内嗅皮质的灰质体积呈正相关，这表明内嗅皮质可能是基于坐标导航（内嗅坐标区域，ECA）的神经解剖学基础。对静息态功能连接的进一步分析表明，ECA与海马体的两个子区域——下托和海马角之间的内在相互作用，可能与认知地图的表征精度有关。总之，我们的研究揭示了日常对基本坐标系的体验与认知地图之间的关联，并表明ECA与海马体子区域协同工作以表征认知地图。
