More research will be required to determine how task demands relate to distance coding in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex. A potential pitfall with studies using correlations between parametric parameters and brain activity is that uncontrolled properties Selleckchem VX-765 of the stimuli might be responsible for mediating the effects. By including a control condition Howard et al. revealed that simply being led to the goal was not sufficient to elicit a significant correlation

between activity and the distance. Thus, representing information related to the distance to the goal in the hippocampus and entorhinal cortex appears to require active goal-directed navigation. An important line of future enquiry will be to determine whether the correlations between MTL activity and distance are related to other factors involved in goal-directed navigation. Three important factors that may co-vary selleck kinase inhibitor with the distance to the goal are: firstly memory demands, secondly the time required to travel to the goal and finally reward associated with reaching

the goal. Recalling the route to far away goal locations would arguably make greater demands on retrieval of the environment than recalling the route to close by locations. Thus, it may be that retrieval demands might underlie the positive correlations observed between hippocampal activity and the distance to the goal. It has been argued that the hippocampal role in navigation is purely to retrieve stored knowledge of the environment, not to make the path calculations [67]. Independently manipulating the distance from the number of turns and junctions along a route would help determine whether the hippocampus processes information related directly to the distance or process information related to the number of fragments of the environment that constitute the route. Hippocampal cells have recently been found to code for the time elapsed during

navigation [68] and to modulate their activity depending on future rewards [69], thus it is possible that the time required to reach the goal or expected reward might underlie the correlations between hippocampal Thalidomide activity and distance. Future neuroimaging studies which vary reward, time and distance, will be helpful in teasing apart these possibilities, as will research directly testing whether neuronal firing patterns are correlated with spatial goal parameters. An important recent single unit recording study explored how hippocampal place cell activity related to the trajectory to the future goal during navigation epochs. Pfeiffer and Foster [70•] recorded CA1 place cells while rats foraged for rewards in an open field environment. After foraging for, and finding, a reward in the arena rats returned to a rewarded ‘home’ location that was stable within a day, but changed day to day.