IPH Lecture: Active navigation and the human brain

Navigation is a complex and dynamic task that engages multiple brain systems for perception, cognition, planning and decision making, and motor control. In this talk, Dr. Gallant will describe human functional neuroimaging experiments that overcome many of the limitations of prior navigation studies, and which produce rich computational models that explain human brain function during naturalistic, active navigation. In these experiments participants first learned to navigate through a large virtual city containing hundreds of distinct roads, buildings and landmarks. After learning to criterion participants performed a taxi driver task in the MRI scanner while brain activity was recorded. Dr. Gallant will summarize the results of these experiments.

The Ian P. Howard Lecture Series in Vision Science was established in 2006 to celebrate the enormous contributions of Dr. Howard to the field and to the international reputation of York’s Centre for Vision Research, which he founded in 1992.