Historically, retinotopic organisation (the spatial mapping of the retina across the cortical surface) was considered the purview of early regions of visual cortex (V1-V4) only and that anterior, more cognitively involved regions abstracted this information away. The contemporary view is quite different. Here, with Advancing technologies and analysis methods, we see that retinotopic information is not simply thrown away by these regions but rather is maintained to the potential benefit of our broader cognition. This maintenance of visuospatial coding extends not only through visual cortex, but is present in parietal, frontal, medial and subcortical structures involved with coordinating-movements, mind-wandering and even memory. In this talk, I will outline some of the key empirical findings from my own work and the work of others that shaped this contemporary perspective.

There is a long-standing tension between the notion that the hippocampal formation is essentially a spatial mapping system, and the notion that it plays an essential role in the establishment of episodic memory and the consolidation of such memory into structured knowledge about the world. One theory that resolves this tension is the notion that the hippocampus generates rather arbitrary 'index' codes that serve initially to link attributes of episodic memories that are stored in widely dispersed and only weakly connected neocortical modules. I will show how an essentially 'spatial' coding mechanism, with some tweaks, provides an ideal indexing system and discuss the neural coding strategies that the hippocampus apparently uses to overcome some biological constraints affecting the possibility of shipping the index code out widely to the neocortex. Finally, I will present new data suggesting that the hippocampal index code is indeed transferred to layer II-III of the neocortex.