Abstract
Animals and humans are able to exploit structural knowledge about their environments in order to navigate directly to remembered goal-locations – a process known as vector-based navigation. Notably, vector-based navigation allows for short-cuts utilising previously unvisited routes to be taken and strongly indicates the existence of a cognitive spatial metric. Theoretical considerations, including those derived from AI-based models, suggest that entorhinal grid cells play a central role in this process. Specifically, non-local reactivations, which have been shown to engage grid cells, are thought to provide a means by which such computations are performed but this remains to be demonstrated experimentally.
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