Spatial and temporal cognition: experiments and models
Dr. Virginia Flanagin, Dr. Kay Thurley
Seminar, Wednesdays 10:30-12:00, room D01.018 aka Aquarium, LMU Biocenter, Martinsried
Details will be announced to registered participants.
The hippocampus and MTL are known to have many cells with spatially, and temporally relevant firing properties, suggesting that these areas provide the neural substrate for encoding space and time. However, evidence has emerged that spatial and temporal tuning properties are also present in various sensory and higher-order areas of the cortex. These neurons are often thought to act in concert forming map-like mental representations famously known as cognitive maps. Such maps may not be limited to mental representations of spatial features of the outside world but may also include non-spatial and abstract variables.
In this seminar we will look at recent papers that describe and model these neuronal populations to try and understand what their similarities are, and more importantly how they differ to attempt to address the question "why does the brain process space and time in multiple brain areas?" As these are papers we have also not read, we may not be able to answer any of these questions. However, we will attempt to gather evidence and come up with new hypotheses that will guide our own work.
12.11.2025
Peer & Epstein (2025) Cognitive maps for hierarchical spaces in the human brain. Cerebral Cortex (Alp)
19.11.2025
Díaz, Bayones, Alvarez (2025) Contextual neural dynamics during time perception in the primate ventral premotor cortex. PNAS (Aaron)
26.11.2025
Chen et al. (2024) Integration and competition between space and time in the hippocampus. Neuron (Arsenii)
03.12.2025
Nieh et al. (2021) Geometry of abstract learned knowledge in the hippocampus. Nature (Daniel)
10.12.2025
El-Gaby et al. (2024) A cellular basis for mapping behavioural structure. Nature (Aryna)
17.12.2025
no seminar, instead please attend Talking Science with György Buzsáki. https://www.talking-science.de/
christmas break
07.01.2026
Courellis et al (2024) Abstract representations emerge in human hippocampal neurons during inference. Nature (Eva)
14.01.2026
Stachenfeld, Botvinick, Gershman (2017) The hippocampus as a predictive map. Nat Neurosci (Jhoshithaa)
21.01.2026
Whittington et al. (2020) The Tolman-Eichenbaum Machine: unifying space and relational memory through generalization in the hippocampal formation. Cell (Angela, Claudia & Miriam)
28.01.2026
Zeng, Recalde, Wiskott, Cheng (2025) Unifying spatial and episodic representations in the hippocampus through flexible memory use. bioRxiv
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05.11.2025
Xiao et al. (2025) Human hippocampal ripples predict the alignment of experience to a grid-like schema. Neuron (Gerhard)
29.10.2025
Constantinescu, O’Reilly, Behrens (2016) Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science (Anian)
22.10.2025
Behrens et al. (2018) What is a cognitive map? Organizing knowledge for flexible behavior. Neuron (Kay)