Every day, we navigate through familiar and unfamiliar locations: homes, workplaces, stores and the roads between them. This everyday process is surprisingly complex, and its details are still being explored. For example, how do we use information that we remember from previous visits? How do we recognize and process landmarks, pathways and boundaries? 

In a new study, Beckman researchers have identified a new brain region related to how we navigate our world and remember spatial details. Undergraduate researchers Runhan "Nicole" Tang and Dominika Panek are co-first authors of this paper.

“The larger motivation in this line of research is understanding how we are able to know where we are in the world, using vision,” said Adam Steel, an assistant professor of psychology who led the research. “For example, imagine you are walking through the Beckman cafeteria: there are tables and chairs, and you know you have just walked through the front door. So if, suddenly, someone yelled 'Fire!' and you needed to get out, you would know right away that you should turn around and go directly toward the doors. You have this sense of what is in front of you, and at the same time you know what is behind you and how you can move through the world. Surprisingly, we are still trying to figure out how the brain manages such things.”

Researchers have known about three brain areas responsible for perceiving our surroundings, called scene perception areas, for some time. These three areas aren’t redundant – each serves a different visual process. For example, one area supports our ability to recognize landmarks, and another identifies paths and boundaries in the environment. 

In 2021, Steel and colleagues discovered that each perception area is paired up with another brain area that handles what we remember about a space but cannot currently see: things around a corner, behind you or otherwise out of view. The paired regions work together to interpret what we see and put it in the context of what we remember about a location. 

Last year, researchers identified a fourth scene perception area, named the superior place area or the SPA. Until now, the SPA did not have an associated memory area, but the pattern of other paired perception-memory regions raised suspicions that one may exist.

The researchers conducted functional magnetic resonance imaging scans of participants at Dartmouth College and the University of Edinburgh. Participants did tasks intended to activate this potential memory area: for example, they imagined standing in their office or a friend’s kitchen. This international collaboration was conducted with Edward Silson, a reader of psychology at the University of Edinburgh and a longtime collaborator with Steel. 

Data analysis and writing were spearheaded by three undergraduates: neuroscience and statistics major Tang, class of 2027, and psychology majors Panek and Leila Barkoff, both class of 2026. Tang, the paper’s co-first author, describes the process as challenging but rewarding. It was difficult because it was her first independent project, but she learned a lot about the research process.

“I think it’s terrific that these undergraduates stepped into my new group and completed this paper in under a year,” Steel said. “It’s just a remarkable feat.”

Following the pattern of the other three scene perception areas, the researchers found a small brain region right next to the SPA that activated when participants recalled familiar places. This region had high activity when participants were asked to recall memories of visual scenes. They also found that this region and the other three memory areas had high functional connectivity: a measure of how strongly different areas communicate or share information.

The group named this area the superior place memory area, or the SPMA, to match the name of its scene perception counterpart. 

The SPMA is functionally connected to other regions which help us make and work towards objectives, including the prefrontal cortex. Steel believes that the SPA and SPMA work together to help us find paths toward our goals in the environment.

For example, imagine reaching a fork in the road on your way to a friend’s house. First, you see the fork. Then, you remember which path leads where you want to go, orient your body to the correct path and continue on your way. The authors think the SPA and SPMA perform this function – identifying the right path and orienting toward it.

In addition to identifying the SPMA, the team noticed that the SPA had a unique location. In the brain, information is often passed from region to region, which can result in a long chain of related areas called streams. The SPA sits at the convergence of four different streams, indicating that it uses information from each.

“These regions – the SPA and the SPMA – sit at a convergence zone of different kinds of important information we need for navigation: where are your feet? Where is your body? Where are you in the environment? What is in front of your eyes?” Steel said. “We think it is unique for that reason – these kinds of convergence zones are unusual in the brain, which means that something interesting is happening in that area.”

Moving forward, the group hopes to uncover the specifics about the SPA and SPMA’s function. Through a collaboration with the IMMERSE Center for Immersive Computing, the team will use virtual reality to manipulate the environment while participants work to complete tasks. This will help the researchers to see what kinds of unexpected changes in goals or surroundings cause the SPA region to activate. 

Editor's note:

This paper, “Scene Perception–Memory Pairing Extends to the Superior Parietal Cortex”, is available here.  This work was funded by a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council Award (UKRI2952) and by the Neukom Institute for Computational Sciences. 

Catriona Scrivener at the University of Edinburgh also contributed to this work.