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

Null and Noteworthy: Neurons tracking sequences don’t fire in order

Instead, neurons encode the position of sequential items in working memory based on when they fire during ongoing brain wave oscillations—a finding that challenges a long-standing theory.

By Laura Dattaro
30 June 2025 | 4 min read

How to teach this paper: ‘Neurotoxic reactive astrocytes are induced by activated microglia,’ by Liddelow et al. (2017)

Shane Liddelow and his collaborators identified the factors that transform astrocytes from their helpful to harmful form. Their work is a great choice if you want to teach students about glial cell types, cell culture, gene expression or protein measurement.

By Ashley Juavinett
30 June 2025 | 10 min read

Astrocytes sense neuromodulators to orchestrate neuronal activity and shape behavior

Astrocytes serve as crucial mediators of neuromodulatory processes previously attributed to direct communication between neurons, four new studies show.

By Claudia López Lloreda
27 June 2025 | 9 min listen