A positron emission tomography study of visual and mental spatial exploration
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The Hippocampal System Mediates Logical Reasoning about Familiar Spatial Environments
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Imaging Cognition II: An Empirical Review of 275 PET and fMRI Studies
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Topography and Dynamics of Associative Long-term Memory Retrieval in Humans
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
The Role of Global and Local Landmarks in Virtual Environment Navigation
Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments
Spatial navigation in large-scale virtual environments: Gender differences in survey tasks
Computers in Human Behavior
The short and long of it: Neural correlates of temporal-order memory for autobiographical events
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
Visuomotor coordination and motor representation by human temporal lobe neurons
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
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The involvement of the medial temporal-lobe region in allocentric mapping of the environment has been observed in human lesion and functional imaging work. Cognitive models of environmental learning ascribe a key role to salient landmarks in representing large-scale space. In the present experiments we examined the neural substrates of the topographical memory acquisition process when environmental landmarks were more specifically identifiable. Using positron emission tomography (PET), we measured regional cerebral blood flow changes while normal subjects explored and learned in a virtual reality environment. One experiment involved an environment containing salient objects and textures that could be used to discriminate different rooms. Another experiment involved a plain empty environment in which rooms were distinguishable only by their shape. Learning in both cases activated a network of bilateral occipital, medial parietal, and occipitotemporal regions. The presence of salient objects and textures in an environment additionally resulted in increased activity in the right parahippocampal gyrus. This region was not activated during exploration of the empty environment. These findings suggest that encoding of salient objects into a representation of large-scale space is a critical factor in instigating parahippocampal involvement in topographical memory formation in humans and accords with previous studies implicating parahippocampal areas in the encoding of object location.