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Question 1

Intelligence and way finding

Answer 1

Related to mental rotations ability but not to general intelligence

Question 2

Voles and spatial cognition

Answer 2

Meadow votes = polygamous and pine voles = monogamous
Turns out that the home range, spatial ability, and hippocampal size of the male meadow vole (poly) greatly exceeds female. However, female pine vole seems to have better spatial ability and larger hippocampus than male (mono)

Question 3

Homing pigeons and spatial cognition

Answer 3

Hippocampus of homing pigeons is larger than non-homing

Question 4

Chickadees and spatial cognition

Answer 4

Store one food item per cache; several hundred which they revisit. Bilateral removal of hippocampal regions leads to greatly worsened retrieval/visits.

Question 5

Parahippocampal Place Area

Answer 5

Sub-region of the parahippocampal cortex. Plays an important role in encoding and recognition of environmental scenes. Damage leads to inability to recognize scenes, only components.

Question 6

Taxi driver brains

Answer 6

Higher gray matter density in the posterior hippocampus; less in the anterior. Posterior stores spatial representation of the environment. However complex spatial representation may come at a cost to new spatial memories and gray matter volume in the anterior hippocampus.
Hippocampus: initial route planning
Medial PFC: tracks distance to destination
Right lateral PFC: deals with unexpected features such as blocked roads
Anterior PFC - spontaneous route planning
Retroslenial cortex - seeing expected landmarks, streets, etc.

Question 7

Video game navigation test

Answer 7

Correlation between accuracy of heading towards a goal in virtual map and hippocampal activation.

Question 8

Place cells

Answer 8

Neurons in hippocampus that exhibit a high rate of firing when an animal is in a specific location in an environment that corresponds to a cell’s “place field”. The same cell can fire for places fields in different environments. Encoding of a map of a familiar environment. In the dentate gyrus, CA1, CA3

Question 9

Grid cells

Answer 9

Type of neuron found in the entorhinal cortex. Spatial firing fields exist at equal distances from neighbors in a diamond-like grid/hexagonal lattice. There seems to be an abstract spatial structure composed inside the brain and imposed on the outer world. Unlike place cells, grid cells have firing fields dispersed across the entire environment.

Question 10

Head direction cells

Answer 10

Active when an animal’s head points in a specific direction. In the subiculum.