Navigation in Virtual Space: Psychological and Neural Aspects

The majority of research into spatial navigation has focused on rodents, often with the assumption that these models apply directly to humans. The development and adaptation of virtual reality technology to experimental psychology, coupled with advances in our ability to record neural activity from the human brain, have provided new information on the neural basis of human navigation. While many of the cognitive and neural mechanisms present in rodents appear to be conserved in humans, our increased reliance on visual input during navigation leads to critical differences in how our brain codes and processes spatial information.