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In the target article, Bastin et al. convincingly propose an integrative memory model as a neurocognitive framework of episodic memory to describe the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying both recollection and familiarity. However, a critical point not sufficiently addressed in their article is the role that spatial context plays in this process.
Each event we experience in our life is framed in a unique spatial scaffold (Bicanski & Burgess 2018; Bird et al. 2012; Byrne et al. 2007). Earlier, O'Keefe and Nadel (1978) pioneered the existence of a functional relationship between the episodic and spatial domain under the control of medial temporal lobes. This perspective has been revised and extended by the multiple trace theory (Nadel et al. 2000), and evidence from both amnesic patients with hippocampal damage and experimental studies have consistently suggested that hippocampus is involved in both episodic and spatial processing (for a review, see Graham et al. 2010).
In line with this perspective, the spatial mechanisms underlying episodic encoding and retrieval have been modeled in some detail (Burgess et al. 2001), stressing the role of information provided by space-related brain cells playing in concert in the medial temporal lobes (place cells: O'Keefe & Dostrovsky [1971]; head-direction: Taube et al. [1990]; grid cells: Hafting et al. [2005]; and boundary cells: Solstad et al. [2008]).
In brief, egocentric (i.e., body-centered and corresponding to a specific point of view) representations of the local sensory environment are transformed thanks to the retrosplenial cortex into viewpoint-independent (allocentric, or world-centered) representations for long-term storage in the medial temporal lobes...