AbstractHumans’ sense of space helps provide the scaffolding upon which autobiographical memories are built. This allows humans to situate event memories in particular locations and underlies many aspects of cognition. Spatial memory draws upon a hierarchy of representations, from simple sensory features, body motion cues, and heading direction to complex features indicative of boundaries, landmarks, environmental geometry, and scenes. Humans preferentially encode features into spatial memory that are most relevant for orienting, navigating, and future planning. To navigate in unfamiliar environments, people encode the most immediately relevant cues into spatial working memory and use path integration to update spatial representations. In familiar spatial environments, people rely on their habitual knowledge, drawing on well-learned associations between local landmarks and bodily responses such as “turn left at the corner store.” Alternatively, humans use higher level spatial knowledge in a range of different reference frames, from viewpoint-specific snapshots to viewpoint-invariant cognitive maps, to navigate in more flexible ways, allowing for detours and shortcuts. A hierarchical network of brain regions including the hippocampus engages when people employ cognitive maps. In addition to being used for planning routes, this hierarchical spatial memory network drives many other aspects of cognition, including autobiographical memory retrieval, spatial perception, mental imagery, and episodic future thinking.
