Spatial and nonspatial knowledge

项目摘要 从一个地方导航到另一个地方的能力对于一个蓬勃发展和自主的 人类的生命。认知科学家长期以来一直认为，人类和动物的导航 以对世界空间结构的心理表征为指导，这被称为 “认知地图”，因为它们扮演着类似于物理地图的功能。一致 有了这个想法，电生理学家已经在啮齿类动物的大脑中识别出发出信号的神经元是 作为认知地图的基本元素的空间变量的功能，例如位置， 距离和前进方向，而认知神经科学家已经研究了 人类大脑几个区域认知地图的神经关联，包括 海马体(HF)和脾后复合体(RSC)。值得注意的是，这些大脑区域 除了空间功能外，还有几个重要的认知功能也是必不可少的 导航，包括记忆、想象力和对未来的思考。然而，尽管 在这项以前的工作中，我们的知识中仍然存在两个关键的缺口。首先，我们有一个 对认知地图在人脑中的表现方式的理解不全面。 行为研究表明，我们的空间知识往往是零散的、层次分明的 与度量真理相比，我们以多种方式组织和扭曲，而我们现在还没有 了解这些“真正的”认知图是如何在大脑结构中表现出来的，如HF和 RSC.最值得注意的是，我们不了解大脑如何将环境划分为空间部分 (例如建筑物内的房间，或城市中的社区)，以及它如何将这些组合在一起 组成一个更大的整体。其次，我们还没有一个好的理论来解释空间认知是如何 MAP可以应用于非空间域，从而允许像HF和RSC这样的大脑结构 调解空间和非空间功能。目前的项目将解决这些问题 通过使用先进的神经成像技术，如多体素模式分析和个体 差异分析：(I)确定允许大脑编码的神经机制 更大空间内的子空间；(Ii)描述子空间的神经过程 表征被合并到一个更大的认知地图中，以及(Iii)理解 空间认知地图的基本原理可以应用于非空间领域。这个项目 通过解决长期存在的问题，有可能在该领域取得重大和持续的进展 关于空间导航背后的认知和神经系统的问题，以及 提供有关大脑如何调节广泛的基本认知的基础知识 功能，不仅包括导航，还包括语义和情景记忆，前瞻性 思考和推理。

Project Summary The ability to navigate from one place to another is essential for a flourishing and autonomous human life. Cognitive scientists have long believed that navigation in humans and animals is guided by mental representations of the spatial structure of the world, which are referred to as “cognitive maps” because they play a functional role that is similar to physical maps. Consistent with this idea, electrophysiologists have identified neurons in rodent brains that fire as a function of spatial variables that are essential elements of a cognitive map, such as location, distance, and heading direction, while cognitive neuroscientists have investigated possible neural correlates of cognitive maps in several regions of the human brain, including the hippocampal formation (HF) and the retrosplenial complex (RSC). Notably, these brain regions are also known to be essential for several important cognitive functions besides spatial navigation, including memory, imagination, and thinking about the future. However, despite this previous work, there remain two crucial gaps in our knowledge. First, we have an incomplete understanding of how cognitive maps are represented in the human brain. Behavioral studies indicate that our spatial knowledge is often fragmented, hierarchically organized, and distorted in multiple ways compared to metric truth, and we do not yet understand how these “real” cognitive maps are represented in brain structures such as HF and RSC. Most notably, we do not understand how the brain divides environments into spatial parts (such as rooms within a building, or neighborhoods in a city), and how it then combines these parts into a larger whole. Second, we do not yet have a good theory of how spatial cognitive maps can be applied to non-spatial domains, thus allowing brain structures such as HF and RSC to mediate both spatial and nonspatial functions. The current project will address these issues by using advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as multivoxel pattern analysis and individual difference analyses to: (i) identify the neural mechanisms that allow the brain to encode subspaces within a larger space; (ii) delineate the neural processes by which subspaces representations are combined into a larger cognitive map, and (iii) understand how the principles underlying spatial cognitive maps can be applied to nonspatial domains. This project has the potential to make a major and sustained advance in the field by resolving longstanding questions about the cognitive and neural systems underlying spatial navigation, and by providing fundamental knowledge about how the brain mediates a wide range of basic cognitive functions, including not just navigation, but also semantic and episodic memory, prospective thinking, and reasoning.