Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Remaining oriented while navigating is a key aspect of survival for many mobile organisms. Previous work suggested that the parietal lobes play a key role in helping navigators determine directions to landmarks relative to themselves. Recent evidence suggests that alpha-band oscillations are crucial for spatial attention and may track egocentric direction as well. We used mobile EEG to integrate these disparate lines of research and test our novel "alpha window hypothesis" that alpha-band oscillations support the retrieval of egocentric directional information around navigators oriented within a real-world environment. Time-frequency-based machine learning analysis revealed significant classification accuracy of the target's egocentric direction within the 8-12 Hz frequency range, thus supporting the alpha window hypothesis. Our results provide a pivotal advancement in our understanding of the neural mechanisms of directional memory by extending previous research that used neuropsychology, fMRI, and EEG into the domain of a dynamic, situated, embodied spatial memory task.