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Poster A in Poster Session A: Tuesday, August 4, 9:30 – 11:15 am, Kimmel Center, Shorin & Rosenthal Rooms

Driving in the scanner: a versatile platform for studying naturalistic human spatial navigation

Tianjiao Zhang¹, Jack L. Gallant¹; ¹University of California, Berkeley

Presenter: Tianjiao Zhang

How the human brain orchestrates the continuous perception-cognition-action loop that underpins real-world navigation constitutes a key question in neuroscience. Typical neuroimaging experiment designs make it difficult to compare results across experiments and to assess the ecological validity of findings. To address these challenges, we built a naturalistic driving simulator for fMRI and applied voxelwise encoding models to the resulting data across several studies. Results reveal the broad cortical network that mediates active, naturalistic navigation, widespread task-related visual semantic tuning shifts across the cerebral cortex, and the relative contribution of many navigation-related representations in the same setting. These studies demonstrate that naturalistic experiments combined with voxelwise encoding models provide a versatile neuroimaging platform to study the human brain systems mediating naturalistic behavior.

Topic Area: Methods, Tools, Theory & Neural Coding