Spatial Cognition and Navigation :: Philosophy Philosophical Papers

Spatial Cognition and Navigation In the complex dissection of the human mentality evolving in our course, great strides have been made on the path to light of thought and action. Evidence concerning the true relationship of mind, body, and behavior has been elucidated through discoveries of the neural pathways modify active translation of input to output. We have suggested the origins of action, discussed stimuli both internal and external, as well as concepts of self, agency, and personality interwoven with a more accessible comprehension of physical functionality. However, I remain unable to superimpose upon the trustworthy construct of brain and behavior a compatible notion of aw arness of self. What are the cognitive and neural mechanisms involved in understanding the spacial relationships between oneself and other objects in the world? How do we even become aware of space and the surround in which we live? What element of the nervous system governs those carry outes, which enable human beings to navigate through space?The term spatial cognition is used to secernate those processes controlling behavior that must be directed at particular location, as well as those responses that depend on location or spatial arrangement of stimuli (1). Navigation refers to the process of strategic route planning and way finding, where way finding is defined as a dynamic step-by-step decision-making process required to negotiate a path to a destination (2). As a spatial behavior, negotiation demands a spatial representation a neural code that distinguishes one place or spatial arrangement of stimuli from another (1). What, though, serves as such a representation in navigation and from where are these representations derived? The processes occurring deep down the hippocampus provide such representations.The hippocampal mode of processing is concerned primarily with large distances and long spaces of time. These processes demand a very specific form of spatial rep resentation, which relate locations to one another as well as to landmarks in an environment, rather than simply to the agent of action. Spatial attention and action, which result from encoded sensory information, are controlled by the parietal neocortex (1). Information relating to the location and stimuli derived from that location is encoded in sensory cortices. Informed by this egocentric information, allocentric representations provide a basis from which ones current location and orientation can be computed from ones relationship to sensory cues in the environment. This particular set of locations is referred to as a cognitive map.