The hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex are considered the main brain structures for allocentric representation of the external environment. Here, we show that the amygdala and the ventral visual stream are involved in allocentric representation. Thirty-one young men explored 35 virtual environments during high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and were subsequently tested on recall of the allocentric pattern of the objects in each environment—in other words, the positions of the objects relative to each other and to the outer perimeter. We find increasingly unique brain activation patterns associated with increasing allocentric accuracy in distinct neural populations in the perirhinal cortex, parahippocampal cortex, fusiform cortex, amygdala, hippocampus, and entorhinal cortex. In contrast to the traditional view of a hierarchical MTL network with the hippocampus at the top, we demonstrate, using recently developed graph analyses, a hierarchical allocentric MTL network without a main connector hub.

海马体和内嗅皮层被认为是异中心表征外部环境的主要大脑结构。在这里，我们表明杏仁核和腹侧视觉流参与了异中心表示。31 名年轻男性在内侧颞叶 (MTL) 的高分辨率功能磁共振成像 (fMRI) 期间探索了 35 个虚拟环境，随后在每个环境中对物体的异中心模式的回忆进行了测试——换句话说，对象相对于彼此以及相对于外周的位置。我们发现，在鼻周皮层、海马旁皮层、梭状皮层、杏仁核、海马体和内嗅皮层的不同神经群体中，与异中心准确性增加相关的大脑激活模式越来越独特。