Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: Extended spatiotemporal representations are a critical feature of navigation. Navigation is not always a continuous experience and can be segmented by boundaries. Research suggests that boundaries during navigation might affect the hippocampus similarly to boundaries in non-spatial tasks. To test whether the neural representations of time and space differ across contexts during navigation, we employed a navigation task in which participants were scanned while they navigated a virtual environment. Using instructed navigational goals, we segmented participants’ experience into different goal contexts. We calculated the neural distance between pairs of TRs within the same goal context and across goal contexts. We found that across goal contexts, neural distance increases, and that changes in neural distance within a goal context are related to navigational strategies employed by participants. Our findings suggest that during navigation there are not objective representations of temporal and spatial distances but instead these representations are modulated by context.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Nichole R. Bouffard
Language: English
Topic: Memory and Neural Mechanisms
Subfield: Cognitive Neuroscience
Field: Neuroscience
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W3216741397