Goal-oriented representations in the human hippocampus during planning and navigation

Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience has suggested that the hippocampus might support planning, imagination, and navigation by forming cognitive maps that capture the abstract structure of physical spaces, tasks, and situations. Navigation involves disambiguating similar contexts, and the planning and execution of a sequence of decisions to reach a goal. Here, we examine hippocampal activity patterns in humans during a goal-directed navigation task to investigate how contextual and goal information are incorporated in the construction and execution of navigational plans. During planning, hippocampal pattern similarity is enhanced across routes that share a context and a goal. During navigation, we observe prospective activation in the hippocampus that reflects the retrieval of pattern information related to a key-decision point. These results suggest that, rather than simply representing overlapping associations or state transitions, hippocampal activity patterns are shaped by context and goals. Several lines of evidence suggest the hippocampus plays a key role in navigation. Here, the authors show that during navigation hippocampal patterns represent context-specific, goal-oriented information.

Automated summary

Recent research in cognitive and systems neuroscience suggests that the hippocampus plays a crucial role in planning, imagination, and navigation by forming cognitive maps. This study investigates how contextual and goal information are integrated in the construction and execution of navigational plans through examining hippocampal activity patterns in humans during a goal-directed navigation task. Results show that hippocampal patterns represent context-specific, goal-oriented information, indicating that the hippocampus is not simply involved in representing associations or state transitions, but is shaped by context and goals.