Research report 2004 - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
How the human brain provides the basis for wayfinding
Authors
Gabriele Janzen
Departments
Sprache und Kognition (Prof. Dr. Stephen Levinson)
MPI für Psycholinguistik, Nijmegen
Summary
People spend a great deal of their time navigating through their environment. To be able to find our way home, we need to store important spatial information in memory. How the brain learns and retrieves the relevance of landmarks at key decision points was so far unknown. With using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging a group at MPI for Psycholinguistic showed that the human brain automatically organises spatial information by dissociating between places carrying information necessary for wayfinding, and others. Data revealed that objects occurring at navigationally relevant locations are stored in the parahippocampal gyrus. The selective neural marking for navigationally relevant objects was observed in the absence of spatial information, and without conscious recollection of the route. This automatic neural mechanism can provide the basis for efficient and successful wayfinding.