The Human Hippocampus: Cognitive Maps or Relational Memory?

The hippocampus is widely accepted to play a pivotal role in memory. Two influential theories offer competing accounts of its fundamental operating mechanism. The cognitive map theory posits a special role in mapping large-scale space, whereas the relational theory argues it supports amodal relational processing. Here, we pit the two theories against each other using a novel paradigm in which the relational processing involved in navigating in a city was matched with similar navigational and relational processing demands in a nonspatial (social) domain. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants determined the optimal route either between friends' homes or between the friends themselves using social connections. Separate brain networks were engaged preferentially during the two tasks, with hippocampal activation driven only by spatial relational processing. We conclude that the human hippocampus appears to have a bias toward the processing of spatial relationships, in accordance with the cognitive map theory. Our results both advance our understanding of the nature of the hippocampal contribution to memory and provide insights into how social networks are instantiated at the neural level.