Daniela Schiller is a Professor of Neuroscience and Psychiatry at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine, where she studies the neural mechanisms of emotional control and flexibility. In this conversation, we talk about her work on cognitive maps for social behaviour, the importance of power and affiliation for our social lives, the difficulties of measuring spatial navigation with fMRI, and potential psychiatric applications of cognitive maps.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith. You can find the podcast on all podcasting platforms (e.g., Spotify, Apple/Google Podcasts, etc.).

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/bjks_podcast

Timestamps
00:04: Daniela's drumming
03:31: How Daniela started working on (social) cognitive maps
08:42: The 2 perspectives on the hippocampus: spatial navigation and episodic memory for relational learning and cognitive maps
15:22: Power and affiliation as fundamental social dimensions
19:24: Start discussing Daniela's paper 'A map for social navigation in the human brain'
28:45: The difficulty of measuring spatial navigation with fMRI
42:51: Clinical applications of cognitive maps

Podcast links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-pod
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-pod-twt

Daniela's links

• Website: https://geni.us/schiller-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/schiller-scholar

Ben's links

• Website: https://geni.us/bjks-web
• Google Scholar: https://geni.us/bjks-scholar
• Twitter: https://geni.us/bjks-twt

References and links

The Amygdaloids: https://www.youtube.com/@theamygdaloids

Bellmund, De Cothi, Ruiter, Nau, Barry & Doeller (2020). Deforming the metric of cognitive maps distorts memory. Nature Human Behaviour.
Constantinescu, O’Reilly & Behrens (2016). Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a gridlike code. Science.
Doeller, Barry & Burgess (2010). Evidence for grid cells in a human memory network. Nature.
Jacobs, ... & Kahana (2013). Direct recordings of grid-like neuronal activity in human spatial navigation. Nature Neuroscience.
Montagrin, Saiote & Schiller (2018). The social hippocampus. Hippocampus.
Schafer & Schiller (2018). Navigating social space. Neuron.
Schafer, Kamilar-Britt, Sahani, Bachi & Schiller (2022). Hippocampal Place-like Signal in Latent Space. bioRxiv.
Schiller, Eichenbaum, Buffalo, Davachi, Foster, Leutgeb & Ranganath (2015). Memory and space: towards an understanding of the cognitive map. Journal of Neuroscience.
Tavares, Mendelsohn, Grossman, Williams, Shapiro, Trope & Schiller (2015). A map for social navigation in the human brain. Neuron.
Tolman (1948). Cognitive maps in rats and men. Psychological Review.
Yartsev, Witter & Ulanovsky (2011). Grid cells without theta oscillations in the entorhinal cortex of bats. Nature.