Do Data from Intracranial Techniques Align (or Not) with What We Have Learned about Human Navigation from fMRI?
摘要
Spatial navigation is a fundamental behavior in humans and many other species. Our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying spatial navigation stems primarily from electrophysiological studies in animals, which have revealed diverse spatial representations at the level of individual neurons, including those of places, directions, boundaries, and landmarks. In humans, research into the neural basis of navigation has largely relied on noninvasive functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and, to a lesser extent, invasive intracranial recordings, which capture local field potentials and single-neuron activity. This chapter addresses how neural correlates of human navigation, observed through noninvasive fMRI, align with those obtained via invasive recordings. Discussion focuses on grid and scene representations in entorhinal and parahippocampal cortices, respectively, which show consistency across invasive and noninvasive techniques. In contrast, boundary and landmark representations in the entorhinal, parahippocampal, and retrosplenial cortices have been studied using fMRI but rarely with invasive recordings. Finally, several invasive studies have observed place representations in the hippocampus, but it remains uncertain whether noninvasive methods can reliably capture such representations, given their sparse and nontopographical nature. Future research that integrates simultaneous noninvasive and invasive recordings in animal models, sequential noninvasive and invasive recordings in humans, and computational modelling is needed to advance our understanding of how spatial neural representations observed through different neuroscientific methods relate to each other.