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The use of landmarks is central to many navigational strategies. Here we use multivoxel pattern analysis of fMRI data to understand how landmarks are coded in the human brain. Subjects were scanned while viewing the interiors and exteriors of campus buildings. Despite their visual dissimilarity, interiors and exteriors corresponding to the same building elicited similar activity patterns in the parahippocampal place area (PPA), retrosplenial complex (RSC), and occipital place area (OPA), three regions known to respond strongly to scenes and buildings. Generalization across stimuli depended on knowing the correspondences among them in the PPA but not in the other two regions, suggesting that the PPA is the key region involved in learning the different perceptual instantiations of a landmark. In contrast, generalization depended on the ability to freely retrieve information from memory in RSC, and it did not depend on familiarity or cognitive task in OPA. Together, these results suggest a tripartite division of labor, whereby PPA codes landmark identity, RSC retrieves spatial or conceptual information associated with landmarks, and OPA processes visual features that are important for landmark recognition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans, like other mobile organisms, rely on spatial representations to guide navigation from place to place. Although previous work has identified neural systems involved in wayfinding, the specific spatial codes supported by these systems are not well understood. We use functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify regions within the human medial temporal and medial parietal lobes that encode two fundamental spatial quantities—location and facing direction—in a manner that abstracts away from sensory inputs. University students were scanned while viewing photographs taken at several familiar campus locations. Multivoxel pattern analyses indicated that the left presubiculum, retrosplenial complex, and parietal-occipital sulcus coded location identity even across non-overlapping views, whereas the right presubiculum coded facing direction even across noncontiguous locations. The location and direction codes supported by these regions may be critical to our ability to navigate within the extended environment and to understand its large-scale spatial structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]