Acupuncture vs. Massage for Insomnia and Pain in Advanced Cancer: Exploratory RCT.

Survival in complex environments requires efficient navigational strategies. From desert ants to humans, successful wayfinding, defined as navigating toward goals that are not directly visible, depends on emergent internal spatial representations, known as cognitive maps [,]. Understanding how such maps are constructed from ongoing experiences and how they can be exploited for flexible goal-directed navigation remains an active area of research in both neuroscience and reinforcement learning. In the brain, the hippocampus (HP) and the entorhinal cortex (EC) are the central areas involved in spatial representation. They contain specialized neurons encoding spatial and contextual information, including grid, border, speed, and place cells [–]. In particular, the latter are numerous in the CA1 hippocampal sub-region and have attracted interest due to the convergence of inputs from entorhinal grid cells, the CA3 hippocampal sub-region, and the lateral EC [–]. This strategic integration of diverse spatial and contextual signals suggests that CA1 place cells may play a critical role in the formation and maintenance of cognitive maps []. Traditional theories of cognitive maps suggest that spatial representations can emerge from multiple navigational strategies. Early frameworks suggested that the hippocampus encodes both spatial location and direction [], while graph-based models captured structural aspects of spatial organization, although often at the cost of scalability [].