A Map of Spatial Navigation for Neuroscience

Eloy Parra-Barrero, Sandhiya Vijayabaskaran, Eddie Seabrook, Laurenz Wiskott, Sen Cheng. A Map of Spatial Navigation for Neuroscience. 10.31219/osf.io/a86gq 

“An animal’s ability to navigate space is crucial to its survival. It is also cognitively demanding, and relatively easy to probe. For these reasons, spatial navigation has received a great deal of attention from neuroscientists, leading to the identification of key brain areas and the ongoing discovery of a “zoo” of cell types responding to different aspects of spatial tasks. Despite this progress, our understanding of how the pieces fit together to drive behavior is generally lacking. We argue that this is partly caused by insufficient communication between researchers focusing on spatial behavior and those attempting to study its neural basis. This has led the latter to under-appreciate the relevance and complexity of spatial behavior, and to focus too narrowly on characterizing neural representations of space—disconnected from the computations these representations are meant to enable. We therefore propose a taxonomy of navigation processes in mammals that can serve as a common framework for structuring and facilitating interdisciplinary research in the field. Using the taxonomy as a guide, we review behavioral and neural studies of spatial navigation. In doing so, we both validate the taxonomy and showcase its usefulness in identifying potential issues with common experimental approaches, designing experiments that adequately target particular behaviors, correctly interpreting neural activity, and pointing to new avenues of research.”

Eloy Parra-Barrero, Sandhiya Vijayabaskaran, Eddie Seabrook, Laurenz Wiskott, Sen Cheng. A Map of Spatial Navigation for Neuroscience. 10.31219/osf.io/a86gq