Spatial Cognition

What Helps Us Navigate the World Around Us? 

 

Spatial cognition plays a significant role in your environment. If a person is familiar with their environment, it becomes easier to navigate the space. At places like your bedroom, classroom, or workplace, if asked to walk around in the dark you would be able to do it without hesitation. This is due to the cognitive map that you have built in your mind that has a layout of your environment and helps you navigate. An example could be trying to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night when all the lights in your house are turned off.  

In Dr. Yost’s research he wanted to see how rats can figure their way out through a maze with a reward at the end. In this process he was tracking where the brain the neurons were being fired and if that had anything to do with how the rate was navigating the maze. To do this an electrode is placed in the brain of rats. He discovered that the grid cells, place cells, head direction cells, and boundary cells play a key role in spatial mapping. Place cells fire rapidly when the animal is in a restricted environment or if they are in a familiar environment. Like place cells, head direction cells direct the animal which path to go towards. Grid cells help with the spatial and navigation of the environment. They are found in the entorhinal cortex, and they fire neurons in a grid-like pattern. This pattern is known to be a hexagonal pattern covering the environment's base. Boundary cells help the animal recognize the edges and borders of the place/environment. Dr.Yost concluded that cognitive spatial maps help animals and humans when trying to locate sound and the words around us. 

Like Dr.Yost’s study, a study by Vegard Edvardsen, Andrej Bicanski, Neil Burgess studied how grid cells and place cells work together to navigate through a cluttered environment. They explained how grid cells help navigate unexplored territory by providing direction towards the goal, but this is insufficient just to use grid cells alone when one's natural environment is cluttered. Obstacles such as clutter can be overcome through both place and grid cells. Place cells help find the shortest pathway to the goal destination and with that, grid cells help with the spatial metrics by encoding animals coordinates in 2D. With knowledge about spatial cognition, Vegard Edvardsen, Andrej Bicanski, Neil Burgess built a maze with obstacles which makes it difficult for the animal to navigate and get to their home/nest. The researchers concluded that grid cells paired with place cells contribute to the animal navigating unfamiliar and messy spaces.  

In conclusion, both studies prove that one's spatial cognition plays a key role in navigating everyday life and how to be responsive to such stimuli such as a cluttered environment. Dr.Yost’s study observed where in the brain are neurons being fired and how place cells, grids cells and boundary cells all play a role as the animal is navigating a maze. In the study by Vegard Edvardsen, Andrej Bicanski, Neil Burgess, they used a similar approach as Dr.Yost and created a maze where instead they put in obstacles to see how well an animal can truly navigate through the maze and what in the brain is truly contributing to the ability for the rats to navigate.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

References 

 

Edvardsen, Vergard, et al. Hippocampus | Neuroscience Journal | Wiley Online Library, 13 Aug. 2019, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/hipo.23147.  

 

Hartley, Tom, et al. “Space in the Brain: How the Hippocampal Formation Supports Spatial ...” The Royal Society Publishing , 5 Feb. 2014, royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2012.0510.