There is a general agreement that explicit memories depend on the entorhinal cortex–hippocampal system10,18, although debate persists whether consolidated semantic information becomes hippocampus independent or continues to depend on the hippocampus forever19–21. In the following section, we shall discuss the neuronal processes that support allocentric, map-based navigation22 and illustrate how these algorithms might at the same time support semantic memory. Our central claim is that the neuronal mechanisms that evolved to define the spatial relationship among landmarks can also serve to embody associations among objects, events and other types of factual information.
