Both 3-D reconstruction and view-based homing have been advocated as models to explain navigation behavior in animals, including humans, and both have been implemented in robots. The idea of a reconstruction or “cognitive map” has a long history (Tolman,
1948), and it has been argued that this is instantiated in the hippocampus and surrounding cortex, including “place” and “grid” cells (Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, & Moser,
2005; Jacobs et al.,
2013; O'Keefe & Nadel,
1978). The proposal is that sensory information from a variety of different sensory modalities is integrated in a common allocentric map. This requires that information from a range of senses is transformed into an allocentric frame despite starting in different coordinate frames (e.g., proprioceptive, vestibular, visual, or auditory; Andersen, Snyder, Bradley, & Xing,
1997; Burgess,
2006; Burgess, Jeffery, & O'Keefe,
1999; McNaughton, Battaglia, Jensen, Moser, & Moser,
2006; Mou, McNamara, Rump, & Xiao,
2006; Snyder, Grieve, Brotchie, & Andersen,
1998). Indeed, our ability to integrate information from several senses has often been cited as evidence of the brain's ability to build a
multimodal cognitive map (Tcheang, Bülthoff, & Burgess,
2011) as has people's ability to take an appropriate novel short cut between two points (path integration; Schinazi, Nardi, Newcombe, Shipley, & Epstein,
2013).