Environment-specific virtual head direction representation in the human anteroventral thalamus during memory-guided spatial orientation.

Environment-specific virtual head direction (vHD) signals are encoded in the human anteroventral thalamus (AVT) during in-place rotation, with decoders failing to generalize across two virtual environments.

• Why it matters: Direct electrophysiological evidence for a head direction signal in humans is limited, leaving uncertainty about whether the AVT supports an internal compass comparable to rodents.
• What they did: Intracranial EEG was recorded from AVT in epilepsy patients during a virtual navigation task, and inverted encoding models on multi-band neural activity reconstructed continuous vHD during in-place rotation.
• The result: vHD encoding was temporally specific to rotation epochs in AVT, did not generalize across environments, and showed no significant encoding in the pulvinar, implying an environment-specific AVT representation.