Spatial Cognition Past Paper, September 12, 2024 PDF

**September 12, 2024** Research on Spatial Knowledge - Are all cognitive maps equal? Route vs Survey Knowledge - Route (procedural knowledge): sequential record of space between start points , subsequent landmarks -- step by step representation of each leg of the journey - Whe...

**September 12, 2024** Research on Spatial Knowledge - Are all cognitive maps equal? Route vs Survey Knowledge - Route (procedural knowledge): sequential record of space between start points , subsequent landmarks -- step by step representation of each leg of the journey - When an individual is unfamiliar with a space they will use this form of knowledge through steps and landmarks - Becomes habitual but still subconsciously uses the required steps that must be used to get from start to finish - Survey Knowledge: knowledge of topographic properties, judgements based on arrangements of objects. -- map like representation - As an individual becomes more familiar and comfortable with a space they will begin to form a map view of the space and use survey knowledge - Map learning should lead to the development of survey knowledge Experiment: - They took two groups and looked to investigate navigation learning ad map learning. Map Navigate --------------------------------------------- -------------------------------------------------------- Redraw map after viewing it Worked in building for 1-2 months to gain experience Redraw map after studying it for 30 minutes Worked in building for 6-12 months to gain experience Redraw map after studying it for 60 minutes Worked in building for 12-24 months to gain experience They ended up collapsing the map groups into one as they found that despite studying it the amount of detail did not change. This is because once a person knows as much knowledge as they can about a space there is no further detail they can add based on the spatial framework of the map along (not including minute details) - Route distance: what is the route they took and the distance in which they travelled - Euclidean distance: straight line distance - Orientation judgement: physically present at some start point - Simulated orientation: (humans are poor at this skill) Imagining you are in a space as the starting point and then understanding spatially where the next step or end point is - Location: given a point within a map/space and marking where the other point asked to describe is located - Map Knowledge: asking the participant to point (angular direction) where a certain point is from a different point. This is an abstract task as they have never physically been in the space and therefore find more difficulty doing these tasks -- this is because there is no physical knowledge for these participants to pull from of their physical self in the space (top down viewpoint) - Navigation knowledge also for viewer errors in angular direction as they have been able to spatially learn firsthand the space in question. Richardson Study: update on study above -- virtual environment navigation - They did not do a prolonged study but rather had participants look at a map, walk through it, and virtually walk through it. - Virtual environment navigation groups scored worst on timed spatial understanding - There is no vestibular information (unless with more meta-verse information) - Lacks the ability for the participant to grasp physical spatial information **September 17, 2024** Early Work on Spatial Cognition - Early research on spatial cognition was preformed by running non-human animal studies, often done through mazes - Behaviorism Era: most early studies were preformed during this historical era where the study revolved around a significantly subjective method of thinking - Behaviorism fell apart partly due to spatial cognitive research Small -- 1901 - First use of a maze to study spatial learning patterns in rats - Rats were placed in the maze and had them run the maze repeatedly in an effort to show a learned perspective of the maze by the rat. The number of wrong turns the rat took was documented. The rats often appeared lost. - Based on the Hampton Court Maze John Watson -- Maze Study -- Watson and Carr (1908) - Discussed that the learning of the maze was not only reflected in memory of how to navigate the maze but also the confidence in decision making about where/when to turn in order to complete the maze. - Made many manipulations in order to determine what sensory processes were used/important for maze learning - Darkness did not diminish performance - Angles and crossroads provide a stimulus in which the rat must then react and present behavior that will allow them to complete the maze. This is compounded when there are stimuli that look the same. The stimulus that requires a certain behavior is no longer a singular visual stimulus, it is the layering of events that create the stimuli (5 steps then turn left then 6 more steps = one stimulus) - Stimulus-Response (SR) - They then decided to shorten the maze: arguments - Perception of walls and corners the navigation of the maze will not be impacted - Kinaesthetic orientation: the rats did have issues with the maze being shortened due to their internal understanding of their placement within the maze - Kinesthetic feedback -- one knows that their body is moving in a certain direction, then the direction of a turn is sensed, and your body/mind is still aware of your orientation in your environment - They then decided to add landmarks on the outside of the maze: when the landmarks were placed around the maze then the rats did use them. When the landmarks were moved despite the maze not changing the rats behaved as though they were learning the map for the first time. This created a gap in the researchers belief that the maze learning was entirely kinesthetic Lashley -- 1929 - Interested where in the brain the memory for space was located - They would damage certain areas of the brain; in all trials any damage would cause decreased ability to learn the maze - Equipotentiality: any area of the cortex being damaged causing a gap in memory capacity - Mass Action: when there are "holes" within the brain then there will be holes in the organisms memory -- there is no memory redundancy in this theory - Accidently they had a rat get on top of the maze, they assumed the reflexive nature would cause the rat to still follow the learned pathway of the maze. This was untrue as the rat would take the shortest route to the food from the entry point Dashielle -- 1930 - They had the rat run through a maze that was grid formatted - They found the rat would not take blind turns that lead them away from the food, they would make turns and follow paths that exclusively lead to the food (never making turns away -- if the food was at the top of the maze they would never turn downwards) Tolman -- 1948 - Argued against purely kinesthetic, SR based navigation systems - Animals behaved in a purposeful and goal directed manner - Reasoning created through a mental representation of the environment (cognitive spatial mapping) Latent Learning: Blodgett -- 1929 - Learning without a form of outcome (lack of reward for learning material) - Blodgett had mice wander in the maze without any goal of food at the end - He then fed them after day three -- he found a significant decrease in number of errors -- this showed learning despite the lack of reinforcement Vicarious Trail and Error (VTE) Experiments **September 19, 2024** Tolman: exposes the weaknesses of behaviorism, he chose to pull away from the ideas that all aspects of behavior was cause and effect and only done through involuntary actions Latent Learning Summary: learning can be done without any form of reward Hypothesis Testing: when animals have to make a sequence of choices, and they do not know the answer to those choices. They will first create individualistic hypotheses in the attempt to solve the "problem" of choice - Each organism can respond differently as the choice is individualistic and based on their own perception and previous experiences - This showed that animals are not passive response machines -- there is the emergence of the belief of the ability of conscious decision making - Spatial learning being seen as a conscious activity Early Studies of Human Spatial Cognition Appleyard (1970) - City built before anyone was able to move in. They then had all citizens move in, in stages, because of this the environmental understanding of the area was purely based on the citizens experiences - High entropy environment: many features that prevent the creation of a grid like layout of the area in question - How does exposure to the environment modulate spatial knowledge - How does active vs passive navigation influence spatial knowledge - Active: physically involved in the navigational control - Passive: still moving through space but not involved in the decision making of route choice - Free recall task: simple recall tasks with low parameters - Sequential: interconnected -- roads - Spatial: the features are the highlight -- buildings, landmarks - Results - \~75% sequential: route knowledge - \~25% spatial - Less educated individuals showed less accuracy and detail - Longer individuals were in the environment the better their map making skills were presented - Spatial elemental characteristics were reported most significantly in frequented areas: the area in which they lived, and the market/shopping area - Passive travellers had much more restricted maps than active travellers Herman & Siegel (1978) - Development of spatial knowledge in children - Overall task: they would bring the children into a large room within the school in which they had created a model town the children had to navigate. They would first walk through the town with the children and emphasize every area of the town that was going to be questioned later on in the experiment - On the 'construct' task, the children had to reconstruct the environment after one walk through - On the other task the children had to walk through three times and then reconstruct the environment - Results: topological performance was quite good - More constructions and more walks = more accuracy - The 5^th^ graders preformed with the highest level of accuracy, they differed from both other groups of children. The 2^nd^ graders however did not preform 'better' than the kindergartners. This shows that the points of cognitive growth for spatial awareness were progressed between 2^nd^ and 5^th^ graders but not kindergarten and 2^nd^ graders - Bounded Space: walls are close to the roadway the children travelled along: the 5^th^ graders preformed with significant accuracy over the other two groups of children - Unbounded Space: road is away from the walls of the room so that they may not use those as severally as spatial ques. The grade 2 students preformed in a similar manner to the 5^th^ graders in this task - The kindergarten children preformed with less accuracy in an unbounded space, the grade 2 children preformed with nearly identical accuracy bounded or unbounded, the performance of the grade 5 students also decreased in an unbounded space **September 24, 2024** Revisiting Cognitive Maps - Viewpoint independent: top down imaginative ability - Represent configurations: one knows the relative relationship between a number of physical points of interest - Allocentric representation: the straight line from one point to another Acquisition of Cognitive Maps: - Generally constructed through experience: firsthand physical experience, story telling, tactile sensory experience, olfactory sensory experience, etc. - The more experience in that environment an individual has the stronger/richer the cognitive map will become - The development of a cognitive map may be due to a cellular organization of connections that creates an awareness of the spatial information - The size of the neural grid correlates to the spatial size of the environment one is thinking of - Critically dependent on the development of the hippocampus - Secondary acquisition (maps, GPS, linguistic descriptions) take longer and do not create as strong of cognitive maps, this may also lead to inaccuracies of the space to form - The art of being lost: not being entirely sure and thus having to LEARN the environment and make mistakes to create depth in the understanding of the space - Early Theorists - Landmarks routes metric information - This was found to not be entirely true as route knowledge can be gained without landmarks understanding. The ability to also have awareness of metric capacities within a space also does not require the knowledge of the landmarks or the routes within the space Construction of Cognitive Maps - Some aspects of the environment play important roles as being a stable que of the environment -- this is seen in unchanging features of the environment (a mountain), this opposes the observable differences in proximal/moveable ques within the environment - Visual information is not the only way we are able build a cognitive map Cognitive Maps - Usage? - Personal location - Goal point of interest - Personal orientation - Navigate routes - Identify and adapt to detours - Once a rich cognitive map is established the primary landmarks take president in spatial awareness - This process can be "messed" with as naturally we are not accustomed to interrupting known primary landmarks in new locations -- this type of research can now be done in virtual environments to see how the individual adapts their knowledge of the space - Orientation: knowing the relative direction of travel - Egocentric heading: angle between observers axis of orientation and external reference point - Allocentric heading: angle between an objects axis of orientation and external reference point (entrance of build and side of the street) - Re-orientation: re-establishment of ones location after losing it - Distal cues: cannot make direct contact with observer - Proximal cues: can make direct contact with observer - Cheng (1986) - Rats use environmental geometry: they guess 50/50 after disorientation with no ques present - When there was features placed within the environment, after disorientation they still followed the same rational process as the environment without features - This led to the suggestion of a geometric module - Encapsulated system: automatic encoding of geometric locational knowledge - Supporting Research: - Hermer & Spelke (1994): toy in one corner of the room, after disorientation the children where able use geometric spatial knowledge and had 50% accuracy of which corner the toy was in (adults scored the same), when a feature was placed within the room the adults then were able to use geometric and featural information and were able to collect the toy with 100% accuracy, this did not hold true for the small children (3-4 yrs old) as they did not incorporate featural information - These studies were done in rectangular settings - Chickadees from extremely rural environments when studied in the same manner as the children they exclusively used featural information as they have not been 'programmed' to take in geometric awareness of their environments. This is expected to be because of the lack of significant primary landmarks in their environment Cognitive Maps and Wayfinding - Even when we are navigating a habitual route the mind is still creating awareness of the other spatial routes in the chance our primary route becomes blocked -- this leads to the prompting of detours Detour Experiments: - Ishikawaa et al. (2008) **October 10, 2024** Neural Basis for Spatial Navigation - Macro-Level: gross structures that are the main forces of movement - Hippocampus - Temporal lobe - Para hippocampal gyrus - Caudate Nucleus - Subiculum: head movement - Striatum - Fimbria-fornix - Retro splenial cortex - Micro-Level: cellular level -- research is pulled mainly from animal studies - Place cells - Grid cells - Head direction cells - Border cells - Speed cells - View cells - Conjunctive cells Hippocampus: Non-human animal research - Plays integral role in long term memory formation - Anterograde amnesia (no new memories) - Declarative (explicit) memory requires the hippocampus - Does not impact non-declarative (implicit) memory: procedural memory, motor and muscle memory - Plays a role in navigation and spatial cognition - Lesion Study: - T-Maze Task - Racine & Kimble 1965 - A rat was placed in a T shaped box and there was food at one point of the top of the T, when they eat the food at that end the rat is then picked up and placed back at the start and must go to the other side of the T for the remainder of the food - When the hippocampus was completely removed their success rate was nearly identical to the 50/50 chance the rat has to guess where the remainder of the food is - This research did not account for whether or not the incorrectness of the rat was due to memory or spatial cognition - Radial Arm Maze Tasks - Jarrard 1989 - This experiment was expanded from the T-maze and now had numerous arms that were baited. The rat would go to one end of the arm to receive the reward and then would be picked up and placed back in the center and they observed whether to rat went to differing arms or the same one - Extramaze cues: the rats without a hippocampus did very poorly when - Extramaze and Intermaze cues: the rats without a hippocampus there was not a significant difference between the control group - This should that local landmarks (intermaze) were processed differently than extramaze cues - Morris Water Maze Tasks - Morris 1982 - A pool of water surrounded by a curtain so that the only way to gain spatial surrounding is by what is on the curtains and what is in the water. The researchers place a platform in the water the rats must find - Even without a hippocampus the rats were able to eventually learn where the platform was, they found that it took many trials, but they could learn, nonetheless. There was no extramaze cues that impaired their learning - Environmental Geometry - McGregor 2004 - They had the rats in a rectangular water maze and had a goal in one corner, they would then take the rat out and disorientate it, when placed back into the maze rats with a hippocampus would always look in the equivalent corner - Rats without a hippocampus began to search randomly, when they added a colored wall (intermaze cue) the rat was then able to determine where the goal was with a higher accuracy than with a shape by the goal as a extramaze cue - Extramaze cues did not aid in the rats ability to find their goals, however, intermaze cues allowed for an aid to the rats learning where their goals were within the maze Human Research - The hippocampus is critical for spatial memory and ability - When more advanced neural scans became available, they were able to observe what parts of the brain were active when doing spatial cognitive tests, this included the activation sites of the hippocampus - Right hippocampus: critical for allocentric spatial memory - Left hippocampus: sematic memory, encoding of explicit/declarative memory \*Research with HM\* - Had his hippocampus removed due to severe epilepsy originating from his hippocampus - Some of his spatial memory was minorly intact but severely disabled - However, he was unable to preform a vast majority of complex tasks \*Selective hippocampus damage\* - KC: only had a very small amount of his hippocampus remaining after a car accident, he was unable to remember the lay out of the library he worked at after the accident but could generally remember the layout of the neighborhood he lived in prior - TT: he developed a disease that causes neural swelling that diminished his ability to use his hippocampus, he was able to understand major landmark to relations, but he was unable to understand his placement in the environment and thus move around within hid spatial environment fMRI - Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging - Takes images of the pattern of blood flow within the brain \*Hippocampal activation while navigating\* - Maguire 1998 - They were able to move a avatar around a reference map they showed the participants, they did this while within the fMRI machine - They had a group of self-directed navigation: they saw massive amount of hippocampal activation - They also had a group of arrow-following navigation: this did not produce as significant activation \*Hippocampus and Spatial Relationships\* - Kumaran and Maguire 2005 - They wanted to see how impactful the hippocampus was for spatial relationships. They would compare significant locations for the individual and insignificant (house vs work OR house vs random location) - The stronger relationship comparison highlighted the posterior hippocampus \*Hippocampus and route planning\* - Spires and Maguire 2006 - Taxi drivers had much larger hippocampus, Bus drivers had larger caudates, Regular drivers had the least amount of brain matter - In another study they used a VR system to monitor the neural activity when they were "driving" - The brain activation was not consistent for the entirety of their drive, a large spike in hippocampal activity occurs when the taxi driver was told where their passenger wanted to go, they assumed that this was as they were planning spatial decisions, then the activation levels decreased as they followed their predetermined plane \*Hippocampus and path integration\* - Wolbers 2007 - Tracking body movements within a space to better understand novel tasks later on - The most accurate path integration occurred when there was an increase in the right hippocampus (movement planning was still occurring) **October 15, 2024** Role of the Hippocampus and Caudate Nucleus - Hippocampus seems critical to place-based tasks: locating oneself in relationship to land markers - Caudate nucleus activation has been shown when performing response-based tasks Packard & McGaugh (1996) - Rats were injected with lidocaine into their hippocampal or caudate nucleus area of their brains: this allowed for the freezing and inability to use this section of the brain during the experiment - The rats were trained for 8 or 16 days before the experimental trials - Route strategy (body position) or environmental cues - The researchers used a SHAM as a control to ensure that the surgical procedure wasn't the cause of the changes/differences in results from the rats actually injected with lidocaine - When rats were trained for 8 days under the SHAM condition they used environmental cues to find the reward - When rats were trained for 16 days under the SHAM condition they used route strategy and the body memory and thus did not find the reward immediately when the side of the entrance was changed - After 8 days of training when the hippocampus was frozen the selection of which way to go was random, after 16 days the rats were correct in choosing where to find the reward despite the freezing of the hippocampus - After 8 days of the training when the caudate is frozen the rats are still able to select the reward side with significant accuracy however after 16 days the rats will still go to the place location showing the override in SR knowledge - This showed that the place based knowledge was still present but when the - Place based strategy: landmark usage (exocentric cues -- top-down perspective): Hippocampus - Route strategy: body movement: Caudate Nucleus Humans and the Caudate Nucleus - Iaria (2003) - Extramaze cue usage showed high activation of the right hippocampus (ex. Turning left at the church) - Individuals who used non-spatial strategies showed high activation of the caudate (ex. counting the number of streets passed before a turn) - Doleller & Burgess (2008) - When people learned the location of a goal relative to a nearby landmark the dorsal striatum was activated (caudate nucleus) - When people earned the location of the goal relative to far away mountains the right hippocampus was activated - Caudate activation related to associative learning -- response strategies - Hippocampus activation showed place cue learning -- route based strategies - Worsley (2001) - Right temporal lobe damage: humans showed impairment in path integration tasks - Path Integration Tasks = novel path usage - There arose no problems with the distance estimation of the novel pathway but rather the angle direction judgement was severely impaired - Left temporal lobe damage showed no impairment for these tasks - The right temporal lobe shows importance in directional orientation - The Philbeck (2004) study did show distance inaccuracies when the length of the distance was extended (farther the distance the increase of inaccuracy) - Para hippocampal gyrus: located below the hippocampus and is made up of entorhinal, perirhinal cortices, and the para hippocampal cortex - Scene processing - Aguirre (1996) - Damage to this section of the brain showed very severe impairment in the ability to create cognitive maps and use maps - They are still able to use route based knowledge but to triangulate position is very hard for these individuals - Wayfinding in a new location is very difficult because route knowledge takes longer to create and would not be present - Bohbot (1998) - Damage to the right para hippocampal cortex showed damage to the spatial memory of objects within a space, this does not deter toe working memory of the objects in the room but rather ONLY where they are in relation to the room as well as memory of objects in relation to other objects - Para hippocampal gyrus damage creates the impairment of scene memory Place Cells - The most studied form of cell that aids in spatial memory - Even with advanced fMRI scanning viewing activation of these cells is very difficult and therefore they must use cellular recordings which is more invasive - Extracellular recordings: electrodes placed in the brain just outside of the cell and record the activation of the cell - Intracellular recordings: electrode placed within the cell near the nucleus to record the activation of the cell - O'Keefe & Dostrovsky (1971): - Cells activate when the animals enter specific regions within space - Showed dormancy in the cells: significant specialization - They placed electrodes in a rats brain and as they moved the rat around within the study environment they measured/observed the activation of the place cells - There is no location of the physical space and the neural activation of these cells within the brain: activation is in clusters but does not mean there are spatially related within the brain as they are related in the physical space - Place cells get remapped in new environments, and they will not fire in the same cluster groupings - Researchers are still unaware of the cause of activation for the place cells - Muller & Kubie (1987) - Thy placed rats in a circular arena with no distinguishing features until they placed a distinguishable feature on the wall: they found the activation of the place cells within the place field remained the same even when the feature wall was shifted -- the had the same activation grids - there are a limited number of place cells and they are reused in different locations -- remapping - Place field is the region where a place cell activates **October 22, 2024** Stable place field: this is the region where the organism has created a concrete activation pattern Lever (2002) - Place cells recorded in a cylindrical environment and a square environment - Originally cells fired in similar manners in the two environments, researchers assumed this was due to the shape of the environment and not the colour - These results were not able to be generalized as every individual has different mapping for their environment Leutgeb (2005) - Global Re-Mapping: creating an entirely new neural map of the space - Rate re-mapping: when environments are very similar the firing place field will also be very similar however the firing rate will differ -- the individual cells will fire in differing rates (stronger or weaker than the original map) Does an individual imagining themselves in a space create the same place field activation as when they are in the that space? Knierim (2002) - Had rats learn to run in a circular track maze: there was internal (proximal) cues and external (distal) cues - Research regarding place field activation when the rat was in the dark, place field activation remained very similar Sharp (1995) - Placed rats in a circular environment until stable fields were established, they then rotated the floor below the *vestibular threshold* (awareness of movement) - This showed vestibular information was integrated when created place field activation There are many differences between the firing process of place cells within humans and rats however the means in which we are able to study human cells also differs - **Grid Cells**: Entorhinal cortex - Fire in triangular patterns - The spacing remains consistent regardless of environment - Research believe due to the consistency of an equilateral triangle the firing processes replicate similar firing patterns - **View Cells**: Para Hippocampal cortex - Activate when the individual views something - **Border Cells**: Entorhinal cortex - Fire near the boundary of an environment - Alter when the boundary is changed - **Speed Cells**: Hippocampus and Entorhinal cortex - Code for speed animals travel - **Conjunction Cells**: frontal and tempol lobes - fire when two or more variables related to space (speed border cells, place and head direction cells, etc.) - **Head Direction Cells**: found in many areas of the limbic system - Code for the direction the head is facing not the body \*How does the activation of these cells differ in infants due to the lack of visual awareness, development of depth etc.\* Individual and Group Difference in Spatial Cognition - Sex and gender are non-binary: early literature showed significant differences in sexes for spatial cognition, this has been nearly proven untrue - Key features should not be regarded as sexual differences but rather hormonal Base Spatial Skills: - Seen in professional evolution: becoming a pilot Spatial Thinking - **Object-based spatial skills**: mental representation and manipulation of two and three-dimensional objects in space - **Environmental-based spatial skills**: representation of large and small scale environmental, way finding, cognitive mapping, orientation and perspective taking Object-Based Spatial Skills (OBSS) - Relationship between OBSS and STEM fields - Types of Tasks - Mental rotation - Spatial visualization - Spatial perception **October 24, 2024** Individual difference in OBSS - Predict math based skills through school aged (Gr 7 -- University) individuals especially females Mental Rotation - One's ability to look at an object/picture and visualize the possibility of what it looks like when it is rotated Spatial Visualization - Participants hold a spatial visualization in mind and must complete an information task with that image while also having other distractors present Spatial Perception - Individuals must determine spatial relationships with respect to their own bodies despite distracting information also present Woking Memory - Mental system that allows for the holding of information within the mind while processing and utilization occurs - Badderly (1986) proposed: - Visuospatial sketchpad -- used for processing and utilizing visual-spatial information - Phonological loop - used for processing and utilizing auditory information Research suggests that spatial skills can be trained and thus create sharpened skill base of that task - Holistic Strategy: rotate whole image rotation - Part-by-part: sequentially rotate part of the image, then another part, then another part - Analytical: verbally describing the differences in one image to another and to make inference judgements (subvocal) - Perspective taking: finding the same vantage point to compare critical features Group-Level Sex Differences - The type of task matters **October 29, 2024** Sex Differences in Large-Scale Spatial Cognition Montello (1999) - Had a very large sample group, attempted to have equal distribution of self identified men and woman, variety of age range with mean age = 47 - Ran 7 different tests - Psychometric tests (mental rotations) - Campus route learning - Males performed better on route distance judgment and survey direction - Females made fewer route landmark errors - These findings approached statistical significance but was not completely significant - Map learning: individuals had to reproduce 2 maps they were previously given - In one of the map trials females preformed better but not with any statistical significance and it was not seen in both map trials - Extant Geographical Knowledge: participants were asked about local, national, and international places and to judge distances and directions in relation to local locations - There was no sex differences seen in distance judgement for local locations nor were they seen in cardinal direction tasks - They found some female errors in city placement tasks: due to the lack of differences in other task there weighs concern that it is not a sec difference but rather a sample knowledge issue - Object-Location Memory: had participants go into a room with two tables and 35 items, they had two minutes within the room, after they left all the objects were placed in a pile and then they had to recognize what objects were in the room and they had to place them where they believed they previously were located - They found no sex differences in the object recognition component of the task - Location Memory: they looked at topological and metric error - Topological (where it was placed -- right table? Was it on the floor?) - Metric (correct table/floor but what is the correct location within that space) - They found females yielded substantially fewer topological and metric errors than males - Verbal Spatial Descriptions: had to verbally describe a route as if they were instructing another person - Males referred to cardinal directions more frequently than females used non-metric ques more frequently - Self-Report Measures: asked about familiarity with campus - Men rated themselves higher on how good they were at route distance judgement - Overall Analysis: they ran all of the data through a computer program in order to see if the program model could decipher who was male and female -- based on the data it showed reasonable accuracy in distinguishing which individuals were one sex vs another sex. This shows that there was enough variance between the sexes to allow for a reasonable degree of accuracy - Females are better at object-location tasks - Males are better at route distance judgment and survey direction estimates but only in new environments as the differences diminish when spatial knowledge is present of the environment in question *Topic 7: Aging and Various Causes that Impair Spatial Ability* Stroke - One of the major causes of impaired spatial ability - Ischemic Stroke: blockage causes blood flow to be restricted to a section of the brain, depriving the section of the brain of blood/oxygen - Hemorrhagic Stroke: blood vessel ruptures and floods a section of the brain causing damaging and killing the section of the brain - Lacunar Stroke (most common): often in the area of the Posterior Cerebral Artery (PCA) - Spatial disorientation and memory impairments are common symptoms - PCA Infract: - Barrash (2000): conducted a large study on individuals with lesions in various areas of the brain caused by stroke, found route learning was significantly impaired in those with PCA infractions, impairment was most associated with medial occipital and posterior Para hippocampal cortices in left or right hemispheres, as well as right hippocampus and right inferotemporal region - Retro splenial cortex damage is common with PCA infarctions - Causes disorientation - Other impairments due to stroke: - Landmark based impairment - Right Hemisphere (RH) Temporal Lobe (77% of stroke patients showed damage) - RH Occipital Lobe (58%) - Location based impairment - RH Temporal Lobe (65%) - RH Parietal Lobe (41%) - RH Occipital Lobe (35%) - Path based impairment - RH Temporal Lobe (38%) - RH Parietal Lobe (38%) - RH Occipital Lobe (46%) Mild Strokes - Those with higher functional outcomes often are assumed to have no cognitive impairments and are discharged in a few days after the stroke occurs - Subtle spatial depletion - Van der Ham (2013) - Individuals who had been diagnosed with a mild stroke and had not experienced a major stroke - Studied navigation, mental transformation, spatial anxiety, sense of direction, distance estimation: the highest level of impairment was seen in navigational tasks - Individuals with more severe navigational impairment and spatial anxiety reported lower qualities of life Limbic Encephalitis - Immune system response that causes the immune system to attack the body's own healthy cells - Patients show profound amnesia and memory loss - Hippocampus and Para hippocampal gyrus are within the MTL: contains place and view cells - Causes frequent disorientation -- severe in places that are encountered after illness - Home environment navigation is not normally damaged as it is already within long term memory Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD) - Developmental condition -- individuals report extreme difficulty orienting and navigating within their world (can even cause them to find difficulty wayfinding within their own homes) - No neurological conditions associated with disorder - Starts early on -- presumed born with this condition - Normal memory October 31, 2024 DTD: - Complete inability to navigate - Are unable to develop any cognitive maps or place based strategies - No pattern of degradation in the hippocampus - Only brain abnormality seen in patients is the decreased activation of connectivity between hippocampus and prefrontal cortex - There is a range of severity in DTD from complete lack of ability to orient themselves in space to low disorientation that can still be managed with other context cues - Iaria and Barton: created a group in order to study DTD -- had 120 participants - Ran general demographic information collection task as well as 9 other assessments - Object recognition - Assessed ability to recognize common objects from different perspectives - Showed no significant differences between DTD participants and the control - Face identity recognition - No differences observed - Face expression recognition - No differences observed - Landmark recognition - Recognize landmarks encountered while navigating environment - Show significantly decreased results in the ability to recognize landmarks - Heading orientation - Asked to recall directional information from landmarks - Preformed worse than control - Left/right orientation (no landmarks) - Asked to learn a route based on a sequence of left/right turns made during locomotion - Preformed worse than control - Path reversed travel (no landmarks) - Ability to reverse route tor return from final position to starting point - Preformed worse than control - Formation of a cognitive map - Measure participants ability to form a cognitive map of a small virtual town - They had a maximum time out period so that there was a limit to how long the participants had to try and form this map - Many individuals with DTD were unable to form a map and timed out the experiment, those that did not took significantly longer than the control group - Use of a cognitive map - Use cognitive map developed in previous experiment to assess if person within video took the shortest route to location - DTD participants show significant deficit - Research showed that deficits were only present in spatial awareness tasks Alzheimer\'s Disease and Navigation - Age-related, degenerative condition that causes the collapse of neural circus due to buildup of neurofibrillary plaques and tangles - Most significant damage in the early stages is the central parts of the brain such as the hippocampus - Before clinical diagnosis patients manifest amnesic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI) - Loss of memory over and above expected healthy aging - Reflects functional changes in medial temporal lobe functioning and regions - Manifestation is seen in spatial memory loss and navigation impairment - AD and Spatial Impairment - Liu (1991) - Had 15 patients with probable AD and 15 health control - Tested for knowledge of spatial layout of their home, and ability to learn the layout of a new location - No differences seen between patients and the control for the knowledge of their home - Major differences see for new locations - Monacelli (2003) - Tested AD patients, as well as young, middle-aged, and older-adult controls - Assessed ability to recall a route through the lobby of a hospital - Pushed them in a wheelchair through a 1000ft route over 4min - AD patients substantially reported feeling lost (93%) - No young or middle-aged participants reported feeling lost, 38% of older-adult control reported feeling lost (significantly less than AD patients) - First causation that occurs to alert patients something is wrong is the disorientation in familiar neighborhoods - Fu (2017) - First animal model of AD created - Genes created neurofibrillary plaques and tangles placed in mice subjects in infancy - Navigation impairment observed \>30 months of age - 30 months is old for a mouse so this showed similar relation to AD as it also occurs later in an individuals life - Entorhinal Cortex is the first observed brain structure to develop plagues and tangles - Kunz (2015) - Found relationship between those at risk for AD/aMCI and the functioning of their entorhinal cortex (EC) - Wandering -- patients leave their home and get lost, risk of the elements due to improper clothing the patients is wearing - Reason for locked wards at hospitals for AD patients - Wandering is a type of Alzheimer's individuals can develop: most severe spatial degradation -- wandering patients often have far more damage to their parietal lobe - "Beacon" -- response strategy for patients to follow stationary targets as a pinpoint for navigation - Patients latch onto familiar que in order to make an attempt to get home - Hippocampus and AD - Early atrophy of the hippocampus in patients with aMCI is strong predictor for AD - AD Development - Increase neural circuitry is seen to develop in those who have a robust map-learning means of navigating - Impairment in allocentric abilities - Egocentric impairment is not as early in the development of AD - YOAD: Young onset AD (any onset before 65) - LOAD: late onset AD (after 65) **November 5, 2024** YOAD: the speed of deterioration is significantly higher when the individual develops Alzheimer's before the age of 65 Allocentric to Egocentric is impaired most significantly: learned task then must be applied in first person action (ex. Told how to do something then made to do it, visualization of space then made to navigate it) Bellasen (2012) - AD and aMCI showed similar path of differences when asked to complete sequential navigation task and route tracing tasks -- aMCI showed less impairment aMCI: there can be different areas of the brain affected due to varying causations (trauma), this causes amnesic results of neural deterioration Conclusion of AD: - Decline of spatial memory is one of the earliest clinical (measurable) presentations of the illness - Allocentric and egocentric deficits are present: even in the early stages slight impairment is notable Healthy Aging - There is deterioration of spatial cognition even in individuals aging in a healthy manner - Disorientation when in high stress environments, new places - Increased social isolation, less varied and nutritious diet, less cognitive stimulation Route System Impairment - Elderly Adults (EA) show impairment of spatial cognition in virtual and real-world tasks compared to younger adults (YA) - More errors - Tend to retrace route more frequently - Failure to remember previous route - Errors occur in allocentric ability and not response-based (egocentric) Causes of Impairment - Decrease in hippocampal usage -- volume of hippocampus degenerates - Degradation of frontal and parietal cortex - Goal-orientated navigation tasks decreases in accuracy - Long Term Potentiation (LTP): changes in neurons (particularly synapses) that causes the impairment of memory retention - Long Term Depression (LTD): cellular network fires less causing decreased synaptic connection - Stability of place cells, ability to fire, and remapping process are impaired as an individual ages - EA begin to use route-based knowledge more significantly, is this caused by decreased usage of other navigation or is the decreased usage caused by inability to use **November 7, 2024** William's Syndrome (WMS) - Genetic disorder of deletion of 26 genes on chromosome 7 - Causes brain growth abnormalities - Characteristics - Distinctive facial appearance - Cheerful demeanor, ease wit strangers - Cardiovascular problems - Developmental delay - Strong language skills - Weak spatial ability Bellugi (2000) - Map out cognitive profile and identifying features of WMS - General cognitive functioning - Lack of mathematic skills and metric sizing - Language - Strong vocabulary skills - Delayed onset of first words - Uses complex syntaxes - Unusual lexical semantics: sophisticated/complex word usage - WMS patients do not have the ability to understand the anomaly of these complex words they use - Spatial cognitive functioning Spatial Ability of WMS - Local vs Global: - Global: overall processing (WMS struggle with this task) - Local: detail processing (WMS process details but lack the relationship between items) - Facial Processing: - Individuals with WMS preform better when recognizing faces than those with DNS. This shows that facial recognition is intact regardless of the neurological impairments - Emotion facial recognition would potentially be similarly intact - Spatial Language - Individuals with WMS lack the ability to explain the spatial placement of objects within their environment - Axial confusion for NESW directions - Sparing object recognition: translation of objects creates impairments in recognition **November 19, 2024** Culture and Spatial Cognition - Environmental Pressure Hypothesis - Geographic location of cultural development - Manner in which cultural group discuss and communicate navigation Research Paper: - Indigenous People of Australia - Semi-nomadic lifestyle - Approx. 30,000 year old population - Living in the internal desert regions - Kearin's Study: - Looks at indigenous children vs children with European decent - They predicted that the core difference would be within the spatial cognition due to the evolutionary pressure indigenous children may be cognitively susceptible to due to nomadic heritage - Matrix presented in arrays of 5x4 or 4x3 - Tested artifactual and natural objects to assess familiarity - Three groups tested - Semi-traditional indigenous Australians (STIA) - Non-traditional indigenous Australians (NTIA) - European decent Australian (AoED) - Preformed 4 different tasks with the matrices - In all four tasks the STIA group preformed with statistical significance over the AoED - STIA preformed significantly better when completing visual-spatial memory tasks even when the objects are unfamiliar - With this it could not be entirely based on cultural differences but rather a genetic causation to the results Role of Visual Experience in Spatial Representation and Applications of Spatial Cognition - How does the amount of visual interaction an individual has had in their life impact their ability to form cognitive maps - Tactile (feeling shape of space) and auditory (reverberations of sound) are both used when creating neural maps. When an individual is blind they must rely on these modes in order to orient themselves - Terms - Late Blind: after puberty - Early Blind: infancy - Congenitally Blind: from birth - Individuals who are within the early blind and congenitally blind groups often have a difficult time understanding metric values of distance: with this information researchers must be aware of how they ask individuals to represent space - Verbal reports often show major differences in results - Congenitally blind individuals show more error in pointing tasks - Equal performance in replacement tasks - Tested CB, EB, LB, and sighted individuals who were sighted but wearing blindfolds - They walked short distanced and then were asked rotate paced on directional task - Traveled various routes from a starting point. The individuals were then asked to go from one external point to another (route had never been traveled) - There was fundamental differences in performance due to mental representation of space in CB and EB individuals November 21, 2024 Dodds et al (1982) - Taken by car along two mirror image routes linking two places -- the home and the goal. During the route following the experimenter explains what the child (CB and LB) should be able to see based on where they are within the route - During the second route travel they asked the child to point to locations they had passed on the original route - At the end they asked the children to draw a map of the routes taken - The CB children did significantly worse than the LB child, the CB children would have had no previous experience of sight Rieser et al. (1986) - They tested EB, LB, and sighted individuals who had been blindfolded. - They had the participants start at a certain point within and walk to a secondary point (A), they then replicated this multiple times to give points A-F from the start point. Once the participants had experience wit those routes they asked the participants to point to other points from a secondary point (walk to point A and point to point E) Loomis et al (1993) - They looked at ow the individuals developed their blindness as well as how mobile the individuals within their study were - This is in regards to how frequently the individual travelled Landau et al (1981) - Child named Kelli (2.5 yrs) was CB - Was guided to walk between reference points within a room from the door - Succeed in spatial reference tasks as well as sighted children who had been blindfolded - In 1984 the study was replicated with Kelli now aged 5 yrs, the tasks were the same as the 1981 study and they found similar results Individuals who were born blind making symbolic representations of space - Individuals who are blind are able to make symbolic representations for navigational decisions and encoding processes Contemporary Work on Spatial Cognition Tinti et al (2006) **November 28, 2024** Final: 75 marks - 37 MC - 13 Fill in the blank - 1 Short Answer -- 5 marks -- from before midterm - 2 Short Answer -- 5 marks -- from after midterm - 1 Long Answer -- 10 marks -- from after midterm Functions of Spatial Cognition - Montello & Raubal: proposed 6 categories of spatial cognitive tasks - Wayfinding as part of navigation - Acquiring and using spatial knowledge from direct experience - Using spatially iconic symbolic representations - Using spatial language -- how individuals give directions and conversationally make sense of their world - Imagining places and reasoning with metal models - Location allocation: finding optimal locations for public facilities Applications of Spatial Cognition - Location based services: geo-spatial tools to assist in spatial-temporal decisions (GPS, friend finding) - Geographic and other information systems: Geographic Information Systems (GIS) - Information display: symbolic communication of information through patterned graphical representations, understanding of how people represent space critical to geographical design - Architecture and planning: variables that effect orientation - Personnel selection: selection of individuals that would succeed in a certain work force based on spatial abilities - Spatial education