Abstract
Humans use external cues and prior knowledge about the environment to monitor their positions during spatial navigation. View expectation is essential for correlating scene views with a cognitive map. To determine how the brain performs view expectation during spatial navigation, we applied a multiple parallel decoding technique to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) when human participants performed scene choice tasks in learned maze navigation environments. We decoded participants’ view expectation from fMRI signals in parietal and medial prefrontal cortices, whereas activity patterns in occipital cortex represented various types of external cues. The decoder’s output reflected participants’ expectations even when they were wrong, corresponding to subjective beliefs opposed to objective reality. Thus, view expectation is subjectively represented in human brain, and the fronto-parietal network is involved in integrating external cues and prior knowledge during spatial navigation.
Highlights
Neural representation for the expectation of the forthcoming scene appears, we applied a multiple parallel decoding analysis, attempting to read out different navigation-related types of information including the expectation of the forthcoming scene from six different regions in the brain (Fig. 3): medial and dorsal sites of the superior frontal gyri, presuneus, superior parietal cortex, hippocampal-parahippocampal cortex (HC-paraHC) and occipital cortex (OC)
Spatial working memory is thought to be represented in dPFC19. Based on these previous studies related to the view expectation, we examined six bilateral regions of interest (ROIs) in the decoding analysis: the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), Dorsal prefrontal cortex (dPFC), precuneus, superior parietal cortex, hippocampal-parahippocampal cortex (HC-paraHC) and OC (Table 1)
Our decoding analyses found that the parietal regions represented the prediction of upcoming scene view in the scene choice task (Fig. 5), implying that they are involved in navigation in partially observable navigation environments
Summary
Neural representation for the expectation of the forthcoming scene appears, we applied a multiple parallel decoding analysis, attempting to read out different navigation-related types of information including the expectation of the forthcoming scene from six different regions in the brain (Fig. 3): medial and dorsal sites of the superior frontal gyri (mPFC and dPFC), presuneus, superior parietal cortex (sPC), hippocampal-parahippocampal cortex (HC-paraHC) and occipital cortex (OC). OC activity patterns represent various types of external cues, whereas mPFC and the parietal regions are associated with view expectation. We demonstrate visualization of individuals’ cognitive map based on outputs of the expectation decoders Taken together, these results suggest that view expectation is represented in the human brain as identified by fMRI voxels, and that the fronto-parietal network is crucially involved in subjective integration of environmental cues and retained cognitive map
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