School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, Beijing 100805, China.
IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100805, China.
Cereb Cortex. 2020 Sep 3;30(10):5356-5371. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhaa117.
A cognitive map, representing an environment around oneself, is necessary for spatial navigation. However, compared with its constituent elements such as individual landmarks, neural substrates of coherent spatial information, which consists in a relationship among the individual elements, remain largely unknown. The present study investigated how the brain codes map-like representations in a virtual environment specified by the relative positions of three objects. Representational similarity analysis revealed an object-based spatial representation in the hippocampus (HPC) when participants located themselves within the environment, while the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) represented it when they recollected a target object's location relative to their self-body. During recollection, task-dependent functional connectivity increased between the two areas implying exchange of self-location and target location signals between the HPC and mPFC. Together, the object-based cognitive map, whose coherent spatial information could be formed by objects, may be recruited in the HPC and mPFC for complementary functions during navigation, which may generalize to other aspects of cognition, such as navigating social interactions.
认知图是对周围环境的一种表示，是空间导航所必需的。然而，与个体地标等组成部分相比，由个体元素之间的关系构成的连贯空间信息的神经基质在很大程度上仍是未知的。本研究调查了大脑如何在由三个物体的相对位置指定的虚拟环境中编码类似地图的表示。当参与者在环境中定位自己时，代表性相似性分析显示出基于物体的空间表示在海马体（HPC）中，而当他们回忆目标物体相对于自身身体的位置时，内侧前额叶皮层（mPFC）则代表了它。在回忆过程中，两个区域之间的任务相关功能连接增加，表明 HPC 和 mPFC 之间的自我位置和目标位置信号的交换。总之，基于物体的认知图可以由物体形成连贯的空间信息，可能在导航过程中被 HPC 和 mPFC 招募，用于互补功能，这可能推广到认知的其他方面，例如导航社交互动。
