Navigating for reward: Rewards & Survival

An organism’s survival can depend on its ability to recall and navigate to spatial locations associated with rewards, such as food or a home. Accumulating research has revealed that computations of reward and its prediction occur on multiple levels across a complex set of interacting brain regions, including those that support memory and navigation. However, how the brain coordinates the encoding, recall and use of reward information to guide navigation remains incompletely understood. In this Review, we propose that the brain’s classical navigation centres — the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex — are ideally suited to coordinate this larger network by representing both physical and mental space as a series of states.

URL/Links:
Navigating for reward (Marielena Sosa & Lisa M. Giocomo), Nature Reviews Neuroscience (2021)