Abstract: Sense of direction refers to an individual’s awareness of their own location and their ability to determine their orientation by relating the self to the surrounding environment (e.g., landmarks and boundaries). It is a fundamental capacity underlying spatial navigation in both humans and animals. Previous research has lacked systematic investigation into the cognitive processes and neural mechanisms involved when individuals establish, maintain, and update their sense of direction during spatial navigation. Building upon previous studies, this review proposes a multimodal information integration cognitive processing model of the sense of direction and provides a detailed examination of its underlying cognitive and neural mechanisms, offering cognitive theoretical support and corresponding neural foundations for sense-of-direction enhancement and spatial perception training in application scenarios that require precise spatial orientation, such as aviation, driving, and virtual reality.
Based on a synthesis of previous research, this review proposes both a multimodal information integration model of the sense of direction and a corresponding multimodal neural network model. Specifically, during spatial navigation, individuals establish, maintain, and update their sense of direction through independent encoding of multimodal information—such as visual cues and self-motion cues (vestibular and proprioceptive signals)—Bayesian optimal integration, and interactions with spatial memory. At the neural level, the vestibular system, a series of brainstem nuclei, a series of thalamic nuclei, the retrosplenial cortex, the postsubiculum, and the primary and higher-order visual cortices are activated during multimodal information integration. These nuclei and brain regions contain multiple types of spatially tuned cells, such as head direction cells, angular head velocity cells, and place cells. Through dynamic cooperation, these cells generate neural signals related to an individual’s directional representation. Specifically, early vestibular pathways generate self-motion signals through the encoding and integration of vestibular and proprioceptive information. At a subsequent stage, head direction cells generate head direction signals within ring attractor networks by integrating self-perceived motion signals with visual signals. These head direction signals are then extensively integrated with visual signals across multiple brain regions during ascending signal transmission along the vestibular-visual pathway, providing the cognitive and neural basis for the establishment, maintenance, and updating of the sense of direction. Overall, the establishment, maintenance, and updating of the sense of direction constitute a dynamic, multistage process of multimodal information integration, with the vestibular-visual pathway serving as its primary cognitive and neural foundation.
Future research should systematically examine the dynamic multimodal integration mechanisms underlying the sense of direction, particularly by investigating integration modes, integration stages, coupling characteristics, and interactions with memory processes. The scope of information integration should be further expanded, especially under visually restricted conditions, to explore the contributions of auditory, olfactory, and tactile information to the sense of direction, and to identify new patterns of brain activation, such as how the superior temporal gyrus, olfactory cortex, and somatosensory cortex are associated with activation within the multimodal information integration neural network for the sense of direction, thereby further refining the multimodal information integration cognitive processing model and its neural mechanisms. Alternatively, neural computational models of the sense of direction may be constructed, using modular modeling strategies to simulate integration mechanisms among different cell populations (e.g., head direction cells and angular head velocity cells) and brain regions, providing underlying algorithmic logic for the iteration of navigation and orientation technologies in aviation, driving, and virtual reality. In addition, future studies may investigate spatial language interaction mechanisms related to the sense of direction, particularly how individuals externalize multimodally integrated mental representations of the sense of direction into spatial language, and analyze their expression and reception processes in cooperative navigation, thereby optimizing spatial information transmission strategies in human-machine interaction and enhancing collaborative efficiency and navigational experience.

Key words: sense of direction, spatial navigation, vestibular system, retrosplenial cortex, visual cortex