Two branches of the scientific literature have dominated our understanding of hippocampal function. One focuses on the support this structure offers to declarative memory, while the other views the hippocampus as a part of a system dedicated to spatial navigation. These two different visions can be reconciled in relational theory, which suggests that the hippocampus processes all kinds of associations and sequences of events. According to this, processing would be similar to a route calculation based on associations of spatial information acquired during navigation and the associative relationship established between memories without spatial content. In this paper, we present a behavioral study of healthy individuals to explore the performance of inferential memory tasks and spatial orientation tasks in a virtual environment. Inferential memory and spatial orientation task performances were positively correlated. However, after controlling for a non-inferential memory task, only the correlation between allocentric spatial orientation and inferential memory remained significant. These results provide support for the similarity between the two cognitive functions, lending credence to the relational theory of the hippocampus. Additionally, our behavioral findings are in line with the cognitive map theory, which suggests a potential association between the hippocampus and allocentric spatial representations.

科学文献的两个分支主导了我们对海马功能的理解。一个人关注这一结构为陈述性记忆提供的支持，而另一个人则将海马体视为专用于空间导航的系统的一部分。这两种不同的观点可以在关系理论中得到调和，这表明海马体处理各种关联和事件序列。据此，处理将类似于基于导航期间获取的空间信息的关联以及在没有空间内容的存储器之间建立的关联关系的路线计算。在本文中，我们提出了一项健康个体的行为研究，以探索虚拟环境中推理记忆任务和空间定向任务的表现。推理记忆和空间定向任务表现呈正相关。然而，在控制非推理记忆任务后，只有异中心空间取向和推理记忆之间的相关性仍然显着。这些结果为两种认知功能之间的相似性提供了支持，为海马体的关系理论提供了可信度。此外，我们的行为发现符合认知图理论，该理论表明海马体和异中心空间表征之间存在潜在关联。