Agency Modulation of Hippocampal Activity During Spatial Navigation

The role of navigational agency during hippocampal cognitive map formation remains unclear. To examine this, we measured functional brain activity as participants learned landmarks and paths in virtual mazes either through agentic self-generated movements or guided video tours. Anterior hippocampal responses were generally lower at objective nodes (landmarks and junctions) than non-nodes (traversals). Agency lowered hippocampal traversal activity and subsequently resulted in faster and more successful retrieval navigation behavior. Moreover, agency decreased hippocampal functional autocorrelations suggesting lowered responses stemmed from sparse encoding. Finally, hippocampal node encoding corresponded to the extent frontal and temporal responses dissociated nodes from non-nodes. These findings show that agentic spatial navigation affords subjective movement decisions during spatial traversal that drive hippocampal sparse encoding of plain space into structured node maps.