A map of the cortical functional network mediating naturalistic navigation (Zhang, Meschke, Gallant, bioRxiv preprint, 2025)
December 17, 2025
Natural navigation requires close coordination of perception, planning, and motor actions. We used fMRI to record brain activity while participants performed a taxi driver task in VR, then fit high-dimensional voxelwise encoding models to the data. Navigation is supported by a network of 11 functionally distinct cortical regions that transform perceptual inputs through decision-making processes to produce action outputs.