Kathryn J. Jeffery

John O'Keefe

Neil Burgess

As we move around in our environment, and interact with it, many of the most important problems we face involve the processing of spatial information. We have to be able to navigate by perceiving and remembering the locations and orientations of the objects around us relative to ourself; wehave to sense and act upon these objects; and we need to move through space to position ourselves in favourable locations or to avoid dangerous ones. While this appears so simple that we don't even think about it, the difficulty of solving these problems has been shown in the repeated failure ofartificial systems to perform these kinds of tasks efficiently. In contrast, humans and other animals routinely overcome these problems every single day. This book examines some of the neural substrates and mechanisms that support these remarkable abilities. The hippocampus and the parietal cortexhave been implicated in various core spatial behaviours, such as the ability to localise an object and navigate to it. Damage to these areas in humans and animals leads to impairment of these spatial functions. This collection of papers, written by internationally recognized experts in the field,reviews the evidence that each area is involved in spatial cognition, examines the mechanisms underlying the generation of spatial behaviours, and considers the relative roles of the parietal and hippocampal areas, including how each interacts with the other. The papers integrate a wide range oftheoretical and experimental approaches, and touch on broader issues relating to memory and imagery. As such, this book represents the state of the art of current research into the neural basis of spatial cognition. It should be of interest to anyone - researchers or graduate students - working inthe areas of cognitive neuroscience, neuroanatomy, neuropsychology, and cognition generally.

The Hippocampal and Parietal Foundations of Spatial Cognition

This book explores the relationship between cellular processes and animal behavior. It does this by focusing on the domain of navigation, bringing together scientists from either side of the brain-behavior divide in an attempt to explain the linkage between spatial behavior and the underlying activity of neurons. The Neurobiology of Spatial Behaviour is organized into two sections. Section one deals with the so-called "higher" levels of description - studies of spatial behavior and the brain areas that might underlie such behavior. The section begins with insects, remarkably sophisticated navigators, and ends with humans, examining along the way issues such as whether animal brains contain maps and whether spatial and non-spatial information interact, and if so, how? Section two delves further into the brain and focuses on the mammalian representations of space and the role of place cells. These issues have far wider ramifications that simply helping us to understand the process of navigation. This system might provide a model for how other forms of knowledge, beliefs and intentions are encoded in neurons. As such, the book will be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience, including ethologists, psychologists, behavioral neuroscientists, computational modelers, physiological neuroscientists and molecular biologists.

Kathryn J. Jeffery

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