Spatial cognition and navigation

Recent articles

Eleanor Maguire.

Remembering Eleanor Maguire, ‘trailblazer’ of human memory

Maguire, mastermind of the famous London taxi-driver study, broadened the field and championed the importance of spatial representations in memory.

By Calli McMurray
10 January 2025 | 8 min read
Research image of place cells plotted onto a reference zebrafish larva brain.

‘Place cells’ help guide freely swimming zebrafish larvae

The newly found cells function like those in mammals, revealing that spatial cognition evolved earlier than previously thought.

By Shaena Montanari
28 August 2024 | 5 min read
Picture of bees in flight.

Postdoc’s grad-school sleuthing raises questions about bee waggle-dance data

A journal has flagged two papers with expressions of concern, which note a co-author acknowledged errors.

By Shaena Montanari
4 July 2024 | 6 min read

Dancing in the dark: Honeybees use antennae to decode nestmates’ waggles

The insects align their antennae with their body’s angle to a dancer—information that vector-processing circuitry in the brain deciphers into a flight path, a new study suggests.

By Shaena Montanari
3 April 2024 | 0 min watch
Illustrated portrait of Loren Frank.

The value of math and spatial learning with Loren Frank

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator discusses what drew him to study the brain and his current work at the University of California, San Francisco.

By Brady Huggett
1 April 2024 | 62 min listen

Explore more from The Transmitter

This paper changed my life: Victoria Abraira on a tasty link between circuits and behavior

The findings from Charles Zuker’s lab put the taste system on the map, revealing that some fundamental principles of behavior are hardwired.

By Victoria Abraira
22 July 2025 | 5 min listen
Illustration of an open journal featuring lines of text and small illustrations of eyes and mouths.

Neurophysiologic distinction between autism and schizophrenia; and more

Here is a roundup of autism-related news and research spotted around the web for the week of 21 July.

By Jill Adams
22 July 2025 | 1 min read
Computer-generated illustration of a brain in a broken jar.

Breaking the jar: Why NeuroAI needs embodiment

Brain function is inexorably shaped by the body. Embracing this fact will benefit computational models of real brain function, as well as the design of artificial neural networks.

By Bing Wen Brunton, John Tuthill
21 July 2025 | 11 min listen