# Spatial and nonspatial knowledge

> **NIH NIH R01** · UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA · 2024 · $549,272

## Abstract

Project Summary
The ability to navigate from one place to another is essential for a flourishing and autonomous
human life. Cognitive scientists have long believed that navigation in humans and animals is
guided by mental representations of the spatial structure of the world, which are referred to as
“cognitive maps” because they play a functional role that is similar to physical maps. Consistent
with this idea, electrophysiologists have identified neurons in rodent brains that fire as a
function of spatial variables that are essential elements of a cognitive map, such as location,
distance, and heading direction, while cognitive neuroscientists have investigated possible
neural correlates of cognitive maps in several regions of the human brain, including the
hippocampal formation (HF) and the retrosplenial complex (RSC). Notably, these brain regions
are also known to be essential for several important cognitive functions besides spatial
navigation, including memory, imagination, and thinking about the future. However, despite
this previous work, there remain two crucial gaps in our knowledge. First, we have an
incomplete understanding of how cognitive maps are represented in the human brain.
Behavioral studies indicate that our spatial knowledge is often fragmented, hierarchically
organized, and distorted in multiple ways compared to metric truth, and we do not yet
understand how these “real” cognitive maps are represented in brain structures such as HF and
RSC. Most notably, we do not understand how the brain divides environments into spatial parts
(such as rooms within a building, or neighborhoods in a city), and how it then combines these
parts into a larger whole. Second, we do not yet have a good theory of how spatial cognitive
maps can be applied to non-spatial domains, thus allowing brain structures such as HF and RSC
to mediate both spatial and nonspatial functions. The current project will address these issues
by using advanced neuroimaging techniques, such as multivoxel pattern analysis and individual
difference analyses to: (i) identify the neural mechanisms that allow the brain to encode
subspaces within a larger space; (ii) delineate the neural processes by which subspaces
representations are combined into a larger cognitive map, and (iii) understand how the
principles underlying spatial cognitive maps can be applied to nonspatial domains. This project
has the potential to make a major and sustained advance in the field by resolving longstanding
questions about the cognitive and neural systems underlying spatial navigation, and by
providing fundamental knowledge about how the brain mediates a wide range of basic cognitive
functions, including not just navigation, but also semantic and episodic memory, prospective
thinking, and reasoning.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10771965
- **Project number:** 5R01EY031286-04
- **Recipient organization:** UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
- **Principal Investigator:** RUSSELL A EPSTEIN
- **Activity code:** R01 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2024
- **Award amount:** $549,272
- **Award type:** 5
- **Project period:** 2021-02-01 → 2026-01-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10771965

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10771965, Spatial and nonspatial knowledge (5R01EY031286-04). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10771965. Licensed CC0.

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