Spatial Cognition explains navigational skills

How do babies learn new words? How do we form first impressions based on the way people look?

I spoke to Dr Tom Hartley, a neuroscientist and lecturer in Psychology at the University of York. He studies some of the questions I mentioned above and more. His research lies in the area of spatial cognition That deals with questions like:

How do we find our way around? How do we recognize places and why do we sometimes get lost?

Your research interest is specifically about Spatial Cognition and Neuroscience. What are some of the key problems that Spatial Cognition tackles?

Tom Hartley: Neuroscience is concerned with the biology of the nervous system at all levels down to the genes, molecules and cells. This is often studied in animals. Meanwhile, some of the topics that most interest psychologists involve things like language, consciousness and reasoning that seem, at least initially, to be uniquely human. They can be hard to study at the neuroscientific level, because despite advances in brain imaging, it is practically impossible to find out what is happening in the individual brain cells of a healthy human being. Complex spatial behaviour (finding our way around, planning routes, avoiding hazards and so on) is something that we clearly share with other animals, so it is a field where we can realistically connect psychology and brain imaging research in humans to the much more detailed understanding we have from fundamental neuroscience.Are people with better spatial cognition abilities better at finding their way around in a new city? How do we get insights about our own abilities?Tom Hartley: One of our studies looked at what happened in the brain when people learned their way around a new town. Again we used a modified videogame for this. In the videogame, people learned their way around two towns. In the first town, the explored freely for 15 minutes, but in the second town they followed the same route over and over again for the same length of time. Then the participants went into the MRI scanner, and we monitored brain activity as the found direct routes in the two towns. In the first town we found that the more accurate navigators had more activity in the hippocampus. In the second town, participants were much quicker and more accurate as the followed the path that they had practiced, but the better navigators tended to activate a different brain region, the caudate nucleus. This is consistent with the idea that the caudate is important for learning fixed routes (these are like a kind of habit, a well-practice course of action that has been rewarded in the past) while the hippocampus is critical for finding new direct routes.Sometimes the two systems can be in conflict with each other, and in those circumstances it is important to adopt the right strategy. Learning a habit can lead to rapid and accurate responses, but it is inflexible. If you need to go to a new location, your habit may lead you astray, and you may have had the experience yourself of losing concentration and finding yourself following a familiar route (such as your daily commute) instead of going to the place you intended to.Because there are so many different systems that contribute to spatial cognition, we need tests that isolate specific functions to get a good insight into our abilities. We developed a test called the Four Mountains Test, which aims to do just that. People have to recognize an unfamiliar place (a computer generated landscape) when seen from a different point of view. We find that people vary in their ability to solve this task, and that their scores on the test are correlated with the size of the hippocampus.

 What are some of the applications of your findings?

Tom Hartley: Because the hippocampus is one of the first parts of the brain affected in Alzheimer’s Disease, a cheap and sensitive test could help identify patients who maybe in the early stages of the disease, and this might be useful in providing better treatment. So we’re hoping our Four Mountains Test will have this kind of application, and we have some preliminary data that looks promising. Another application might be to identify people who have a particular aptitude for navigation.

 What are ways in which people can improve their abilities in this area?

Tom Hartley: We know that London taxi drivers, who undergo an intensive training called “the Knowledge” are particularly good at navigation. We do know from other research (especially from Prof. Eleanor Maguire and colleagues at UCL), that brings about changes in the taxi drivers hippocampi. However, this training will be too much for most people. There is some evidence that brain regions that contribute to navigation are more responsive to pictures of objects that have previously been seen at junctions or “decision points”. My own tip (it’s not directly supported by scientific evidence as far as I am aware) would be to look carefully at distinctive objects near junctions and to try to imagine what they will look like if seen from another point of view (this might help you if you come back by retracing your steps). The other ideas are also common sense, I am not sure they are scientifically proven, but they make sense to me: when exploring a new town for the first time, avoid taking the same route repeatedly. This should have several advantages. You will see more of the area you are in, you will find out how different routes are connected, and you’ll avoid building up a habit of going by one specific route. Set aside some time when you don’t have an urgent appointment to get to and use it to explore. Identify tall landmarks that are visible from long distances and also spend time looking all around at locations which have long views into the distance. If using a map, try to look away from time to time and “test your instincts” by going a few hundred meters before checking that you’re on the right track.------------Tom Hartley's blog is ThermalToy (an anagram of his name)Join me on Twitter @AbhijitBhaduriHow to build your "Curiosity Muscle" <Click>