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The Journal of Neuroscience, August 29, 2007, 27(35):9408-9416; doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2146-07.2007

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Behavioral/Systems/Cognitive
Differential Recruitment of the Hippocampus, Medial Prefrontal Cortex, and the Human Motion Complex during Path Integration in Humans

Thomas Wolbers,^1,2 * Jan M. Wiener,^3,4 * Hanspeter A. Mallot,⁴ and Christian Büchel²

¹Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, California 93106, ²Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, 20246 Hamburg, Germany, ³Laboratoire de Physiologie de la Perception et de l'Action, Collège de France, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 75231 Paris, France, and ⁴Department of Zoology, University of Tübingen, 72076 Tübingen, Germany

Correspondence should be addressed to Thomas Wolbers, Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. Email: wolbers{at}psych.ucsb.edu

Path integration, the ability to sense self-motion for keeping track of changes in orientation and position, constitutes a fundamental mechanism of spatial navigation and a keystone for the development of cognitive maps. Whereas animal path integration is predominantly supported by the head-direction, grid, and place cell systems, the neural foundations are not well understood in humans. Here we used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a virtual rendition of a triangle completion paradigm to test whether human path integration recruits a cortical system similar to that of rodents and nonhuman primates. Participants traveled along two legs of a triangle before pointing toward the starting location. In accordance with animal models, stronger right hippocampal activation predicted more accurate updating of the starting location on a trial-by-trial basis. Moreover, between-subjects fluctuations in response consistency were negatively correlated with bilateral hippocampal and medial prefrontal activation, and bilateral recruitment of the human motion complex (hMT+) covaried with individual path integration capability. Given that these effects were absent in a perceptual control task, the present study provides the first evidence that visual path integration is related to the dynamic interplay of self-motion processing in hMT+, higher-level spatial processes in the hippocampus, and spatial working memory in medial prefrontal cortex.

Key words: path integration; navigation; virtual reality; spatial memory; hippocampus; functional MRI

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Received Dec. 21, 2006; revised July 12, 2007; accepted July 13, 2007.

Correspondence should be addressed to Thomas Wolbers, Department of Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106. Email: wolbers{at}psych.ucsb.edu

This article has been cited by other articles:

				Y. Shrager, C. B. Kirwan, and L. R. Squire Neural basis of the cognitive map: Path integration does not require hippocampus or entorhinal cortex PNAS, August 19, 2008; 105(33): 12034 - 12038. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

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