PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Jordan Crivelli-Decker
AU  - Alex Clarke
AU  - Seongmin A. Park
AU  - Derek J. Huffman
AU  - Erie Boorman
AU  - Charan Ranganath
TI  - Goal-oriented predictive representations in the human hippocampus
AID  - 10.1101/2021.08.18.456881
DP  - 2021 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2021.08.18.456881
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/08/18/2021.08.18.456881.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/08/18/2021.08.18.456881.full
AB  - Recent work in cognitive and systems neuroscience has suggested that the hippocampus might support planning, imagination, and navigation by forming “cognitive maps” that capture the structure of physical spaces, tasks, and situations. Critically, navigation involves planning within a context and disambiguating similar contexts to reach a goal. We examined hippocampal activity patterns in humans during a goal-directed navigation task to examine how contextual and goal information are incorporated in the construction and execution of navigational plans. Results demonstrate that, during planning, the hippocampus carries a context-specific representation of a future goal. Importantly, this effect could not be explained by stimulus or spatial information alone. During navigation, we observed reinstatement of activity patterns in the hippocampus ahead of participants’ required actions, which was strongest for behaviorally relevant points in the sequence. These results suggest that, rather than simply representing overlapping associations, hippocampal activity patterns are powerfully shaped by context and goals.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.