Research from MIT demonstrates that cognitive maps, usually used for physical navigation and stored in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex, are also created and activated during mental navigation without sensory input. Credit: SciTechDaily.comneuroscientists have discovered that the brain uses the same cognitive representations whether navigating through space physically or mentally.
New research from MIT has found that such mental maps also are created and activated when you merely think about sequences of experiences, in the absence of any physical movement or sensory input. In an animal study, the researchers found that the entorhinal cortex harbors a cognitive map of what animals experience while they use a joystick to browse through a sequence of images. These cognitive maps are then activated when thinking about these sequences, even when the images are not visible.
“These cognitive maps are being recruited to perform mental navigation, without any sensory input or motor output. We are able to see a signature of this map presenting itself as the animal is going through these experiences mentally,” says Mehrdad Jazayeri, an associate professor of brain and cognitive sciences, a member of MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, and the senior author of the study.
In the new study, Jazayeri and his colleagues wanted to explore whether these cognitive maps are also built and then used during purely mental run-throughs or imagining of movement through nonspatial domains.To explore that possibility, the researchers trained animals to use a joystick to trace a path through a sequence of images spaced at regular temporal intervals. During the training, the animals were shown only a subset of pairs of images but not all the pairs.
“The brain goes through these bumps of activity at the expected time when the intervening images would have passed by the animal’s eyes, which they never did,” Jazayeri says. “And the timing between these bumps, critically, was exactly the timing that the animal would have expected to reach each of those, which in this case was 0.65 seconds.”
“The key element that we needed to add is that this system has the capacity to learn bidirectionally by communicating with sensory inputs. Through the associational learning that the model goes through, it will actually recreate those sensory experiences,” Jazayeri says.
Technology Technology Latest News, Technology Technology Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: SciTechDaily1 - 🏆 84. / 68 Read more »
Source: SciTechDaily1 - 🏆 84. / 68 Read more »
Source: SciTechDaily1 - 🏆 84. / 68 Read more »