Theories disagree whether environments with irregular layouts impair spatial memory or help us stay oriented. The authors show that spatial memory can be enhanced or disrupted depending on where we ar...

Successful knowledge generalization requires integrating overlapping experiences into flexible memory representations that support inference beyond direct experience. Although context is known to infl...

Curiosity is a key driver of exploration and learning. Prior empirical studies have largely focused on internal mechanisms of curiosity and not its in…

Emergency Petition to Protect Iranian Students, Scholars, and Professionals in the United

Background: Spatial navigation relies on egocentric and allocentric frames of reference, with the latter critically impaired in Alzheimer disease (AD) due to hippocampal involvement. Recent evidence s...

Topography is a well-described and well-known concept for cortical organization in primary sensory and motor cortices of mammalian brains. Similar ...

Hippocampal subfields differentially develop and age, and they vary in vulnerability to neurodegenerative diseases. Innovation in high-resolution imaging has accelerated clinical research on human hi....

Spatial attention supports navigation by prioritizing information from selected locations. A candidate neural mechanism is provided by theta-paced sweeps in grid- and place-cell population activity, which sample nearby space in a left-right-alternating pattern coordinated by parasubicular direction signals. During exploration, this alternation promotes uniform spatial coverage, but whether sweeps can be flexibly tuned to locations of particular interest remains unclear. Using large-scale Neuropixels recordings in freely-behaving rats, we show that sweeps and direction signals are rapidly and dynamically modulated: they track moving targets during pursuit, precede orienting responses during immobility, and reverse during backward locomotion — without prior spatial learning. Similar modulation occurs during REM sleep. Canonical head-direction signals remain head-aligned. These findings identify sweeps as a flexible, attention-like mechanism for selectively sampling allocentric cognitive maps. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest. European Research Council, Synergy Grant 951319 (EIM) The Research Council of Norway, Centre of Neural Computation 223262 (EIM, MBM), Centre for Algorithms in the Cortex 332640 (EIM, MBM), National Infrastructure grant (NORBRAIN, 295721 and 350201) The Kavli Foundation, https://ror.org/00kztt736 Ministry of Science and Education, Norway (EIM, MBM) Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences; NTNU, Norway (AZV)

Statistical learning—the ability to extract patterns from noisy continuous experiences—is fundamental to human cognition. Yet, how contextual factors shape this process remains poorly understood. Musi...