When landmarks are not enough

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Abstract

Including geometric spatial cues in an environment can help reverse the difficulties with spatial navigation experienced by children and older adults.

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Most cited references 8

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Spatial navigation deficits — overlooked cognitive marker for preclinical Alzheimer disease?

Michael Hornberger, Jakub Hort, Jan Laczó … (2018)

Detection of incipient Alzheimer disease (AD) pathophysiology is critical to identify preclinical individuals and target potentially disease-modifying therapies towards them. Current neuroimaging and biomarker research is strongly focused in this direction, with the aim of establishing AD fingerprints to identify individuals at high risk of developing this disease. By contrast, cognitive fingerprints for incipient AD are virtually non-existent as diagnostics and outcomes measures are still focused on episodic memory deficits as the gold standard for AD, despite their low sensitivity and specificity for identifying at-risk individuals. This Review highlights a novel feature of cognitive evaluation for incipient AD by focusing on spatial navigation and orientation deficits, which are increasingly shown to be present in at-risk individuals. Importantly, the navigation system in the brain overlaps substantially with the regions affected by AD in both animal models and humans. Notably, spatial navigation has fewer verbal, cultural and educational biases than current cognitive tests and could enable a more uniform, global approach towards cognitive fingerprints of AD and better cognitive treatment outcome measures in future multicentre trials. The current Review appraises the available evidence for spatial navigation and/or orientation deficits in preclinical, prodromal and confirmed AD and identifies research gaps and future research priorities.

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Age effects on wayfinding and route learning skills.

Denise Head, Marlisa Isom (2010)

While existing evidence suggests that older adults have compromised spatial navigation abilities, the effects of age on specific aspects of navigational skill are less well specified. The current study examined age effects on spatial navigation abilities considering the multiple cognitive and neural factors that contribute to successful navigation. Young and older adults completed wayfinding and route learning tasks in a virtual environment and aspects of environmental knowledge were assessed. Prefrontal, caudate and hippocampal volumes were obtained in a subset of older adults. Age differences were observed in both wayfinding and route learning. For wayfinding, there were age effects in recalling landmarks, and recognizing environmental scenes. In the route learning condition, older adults evidenced difficulty with the location, temporal order and directional information of landmarks. In both conditions, there was evidence of age-related differences in the acquisition of configural knowledge. Wayfinding was associated with the hippocampus whereas route learning was associated with the caudate nucleus. These results provide indications of specific aspects of navigational learning that may contribute to age-related declines and potential neural substrates.

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Age differences in the neural systems supporting human allocentric spatial navigation.

S. Moffat, Wendy Elkins, Susan Resnick (2006)

Age-related declines in spatial navigation are well-known in human and non-human species. Studies in non-human species suggest that alteration in hippocampal and other neural circuitry may underlie behavioral deficits associated with aging but little is known about the neural mechanisms of human age-related decline in spatial navigation. The purpose of the present study was to examine age differences in functional brain activation during virtual environment navigation. Voxel-based analysis of activation patterns in young subjects identified activation in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, retrosplenial cortex, right and left lateral parietal cortex, medial parietal lobe and cerebellum. In comparison to younger subjects, elderly participants showed reduced activation in the hippocampus and parahippocampal gyrus, medial parietal lobe and retrosplenial cortex. Relative to younger participants elderly subjects showed increased activation in anterior cingulate gyrus and medial frontal lobe. These results provide evidence of age specific neural networks supporting spatial navigation and identify a putative neural substrate for age-related differences in spatial memory and navigational skill.

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Author and article information

Contributors

Paul F Hill:

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9983-0842

Journal

Journal ID (nlm-ta): eLife

Journal ID (iso-abbrev): Elife

Journal ID (publisher-id): eLife

Title: eLife

Publisher: eLife Sciences Publications, Ltd

ISSN (Electronic): 2050-084X

Publication date (Electronic, pub): 21 April 2023

Publication date Collection: 2023

Volume: 12

Electronic Location Identifier: e87771

Affiliations

[1 ] Department of Psychology, University of Arizona ( https://ror.org/03m2x1q45) Tucson United States

Author information

Paul F Hill https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9983-0842

Article

Publisher ID: 87771

DOI: 10.7554/eLife.87771

PMC ID: 10121216

PubMed ID: 37083558

SO-VID: 6d70edce-b709-471c-87f5-5e9592ce48c6

License:

This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.

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Custom metadata

Author impact statement Including geometric spatial cues in an environment can help reverse the difficulties with spatial navigation experienced by children and older adults.

Template 1

ScienceOpen disciplines: Life sciences

Keywords: spatial navigation,spatial cognition,human aging,landmark,geometry,human

Data availability:

ScienceOpen disciplines: Life sciences

Keywords: spatial navigation, spatial cognition, human aging, landmark, geometry, human