A map of the cortical functional network mediating naturalistic navigation

The first quantitative map of the cortical regions that are engaged as people actively navigate. Active navigation engages multiple regions across the visual, parietal, and prefrontal cortices. Representations are distributed, and each region represents a complex mixture of navigation-related infromation.

Navigation-related information is known to be represented broadly across the human cerebral cortex, but the anatomical and functional organization of the cortical navigation network has remained unclear. We recorded brain activity with fMRI while participants performed a naturalistic navigation task in virtual reality, and fit high-dimensional voxelwise encoding models using banded ridge regression across 38 feature spaces comprising 28,134 features. This approach identified 11 functionally distinct cortical regions that support navigation: five prefrontal, three parietal, and three previously identified visual regions. Each region represents a unique combination of navigation-related features, and the regions are organized along broadly distributed functional cortical gradients, providing the first quantitative map of the cortical network that mediates naturalistic navigation.