Spatial cognition and navigation

Recent articles

Nachum Ulanovsky sits against a black background with one bat in his hands and another with its wings spread above his head.

Neuroscience’s leaders, legacies and rising stars of 2025

Here are seven stories from the past year about some of the field’s most engaging figures.

By The Transmitter
24 December 2025 | 2 min read
Nachum Ulanovsky sits against a black background with one bat in his hands and another with its wings spread above his head.

Diving in with Nachum Ulanovsky

With an eye toward realism, the neuroscientist creates microcosms of the natural world to understand animal behavior.

By Claudia López Lloreda
16 October 2025 | 14 min read
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

A human silhouette with lines connecting the brain to various organs.

PIEZO channels are opening the study of mechanosensation in unexpected places

The force-activated ion channels underlie the senses of touch and proprioception. Now scientists are using them as a tool to explore molecular mechanisms at work in internal organs, including the heart, bladder, uterus and kidney.

By Calli McMurray
30 January 2026 | 6 min read
US Department of Health and Human Services building.

Latest iteration of U.S. federal autism committee comes under fire

The new panel “represents a radical departure from all past rosters,” says autism researcher Helen Tager-Flusberg.

By Angie Voyles Askham
29 January 2026 | 9 min read
Progenitors cells in the medial ganglionic eminence become increasingly organized during development as rows of brain imaging progress from top to bottom.

‘Tour de force’ study flags fount of interneurons in human brain

The newly discovered cell type might point to the origins of the inhibitory imbalance linked to autism and other conditions.

By Holly Barker
29 January 2026 | 4 min read

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