{"id":220367,"date":"2025-08-19T00:05:32","date_gmt":"2025-08-19T05:05:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/identifying-a-compass-in-the-human-brain"},"modified":"2025-08-19T00:05:32","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T05:05:32","slug":"identifying-a-compass-in-the-human-brain","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/08\/identifying-a-compass-in-the-human-brain","title":{"rendered":"Identifying a compass in the human brain"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/identifying-a-compass-in-the-human-brain.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Zhengang Lu and Russell Epstein, from the University of Pennsylvania, led a study to explore how people maintain their sense of direction while navigating naturalistic, virtual reality cities.<\/p>\n<p>As reported in their <i>JNeurosci<\/i> paper, the researchers collected neuroimaging data while 15 participants performed a taxi-driving task in a virtual reality city. Two <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/brain+regions\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">brain regions<\/a> represented a forward-facing direction as people moved around. This <a href=\"https:\/\/medicalxpress.com\/tags\/neural+signal\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">neural signal<\/a> was consistent across variations of the city with different visual features.<\/p>\n<p>The signal was also consistent across different phases of the task (i.e., picking up a passenger versus driving a passenger to their drop-off location) and various locations in the city. Additional analyses suggest that these brain regions represent a broad range of facing directions by keeping track of direction relative to the north\u2013south axis of the environment.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Zhengang Lu and Russell Epstein, from the University of Pennsylvania, led a study to explore how people maintain their sense of direction while navigating naturalistic, virtual reality cities. As reported in their JNeurosci paper, the researchers collected neuroimaging data while 15 participants performed a taxi-driving task in a virtual reality city. Two brain regions represented [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":662,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,1879],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220367","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-neuroscience","category-virtual-reality"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220367","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220367"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220367\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220367"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220367"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220367"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}