Zhao Mintao
School of Psychology, University of East Anglia , Norwich , United Kingdom.
Department of Human Perception, Cognition, and Action, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics , Tübingen , Germany.
J Neurophysiol. 2018 Nov 1;120(5):2453-2465. doi: 10.1152/jn.00781.2017. Epub 2018 Aug 22.
Studies of human and rodent navigation often reveal a remarkable cross-species similarity between the cognitive and neural mechanisms of navigation. Such cross-species resemblance often overshadows some critical differences between how humans and nonhuman animals navigate. In this review, I propose that a navigation system requires both a storage system (i.e., representing spatial information) and a positioning system (i.e., sensing spatial information) to operate. I then argue that the way humans represent spatial information is different from that inferred from the cellular activity observed during rodent navigation. Such difference spans the whole hierarchy of spatial representation, from representing the structure of an environment to the representation of subregions of an environment, routes and paths, and the distance and direction relative to a goal location. These cross-species inconsistencies suggest that what we learn from rodent navigation does not always transfer to human navigation. Finally, I argue for closing the loop for the dominant, unidirectional animal-to-human approach in navigation research so that insights from behavioral studies of human navigation may also flow back to shed light on the cellular mechanisms of navigation for both humans and other mammals (i.e., a human-to-animal approach).
对人类和啮齿动物导航的研究常常揭示出导航的认知和神经机制之间存在显著的跨物种相似性。这种跨物种的相似性往往掩盖了人类和非人类动物在导航方式上的一些关键差异。在这篇综述中，我提出一个导航系统需要一个存储系统（即表示空间信息）和一个定位系统（即感知空间信息）才能运行。然后我认为，人类表示空间信息的方式不同于从啮齿动物导航过程中观察到的细胞活动所推断出的方式。这种差异贯穿了空间表示的整个层次结构，从表示环境的结构到表示环境的子区域、路线和路径，以及相对于目标位置的距离和方向。这些跨物种的不一致表明，我们从啮齿动物导航中学到的东西并不总是能应用到人类导航中。最后，我主张在导航研究中打破主导的、单向的从动物到人类的研究方法的循环，以便人类导航行为研究的见解也能回流，为人类和其他哺乳动物的导航细胞机制提供启示（即从人类到动物的研究方法）。
