SCANN Lab

Spatial navigation is an important ability needed in order to be able to navigate through both familiar and new environments. It involves the use of many different senses and environmental cues, like arrows, maps, or compasses. When a person learns to navigate in an unfamiliar environment, that information is stored within our brains for later use during navigation, such as in planning out the routes for a day trip in a new city. When navigation abilities are impaired, this can lead to dangerous circumstances while navigating, such as improper judgement of distance while driving, which could cause you to bump into things, or getting lost. The focus of this research is to use fMRI imaging to examine the parts of the brain that are used most frequently while learning routes in a virtual reality environment. Another goal is to investigate differences across participants in the cognitive processes that cause them to make the decision to either rely on learned routes or to take shortcuts to a goal location. Understanding these interactions will help to promote enhanced spatial navigational performance. Led by Eliany Perez.

Spatial navigation is an important skill, and it is common for spatial navigation abilities to degrade during normal aging, with extreme deficits being prevalent symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. Spatial navigation behavior is often supported by navigation cues (e.g., maps, arrows, and verbal instructions) that show the way to go. But, before these cues can be converted into routes, people need to find them, a task requiring visual attention. Indeed, individuals with Alzheimer’s disease also exhibit impairments in visual attention, which may underlie impairments in spatial navigation. Thus, the overarching goal of this research is to investigate the relation between visual attention capacity and spatial navigation abilities in patients with Alzheimer’s disease and healthy age-matched controls. A better understanding of the interaction between visual attention and spatial navigation will enhance mobility, improve safety, and increase quality of life for older adults. Led by Adam Barnas.

Establishing a connection between the structural properties of the brain and the behavior exhibited is a fundamental question of neuroscience. Spatial navigation and episodic memory are two higher order abilities whose degradation linked to old age and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease. We use Graph Convolutional Neural Networks (GCNNs) to extract structural and connectivity across brain regions in large fMRI-based datasets and understand their impact on spatial navigation and episodic memory. Such models may pave way for potential early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s and reveal new associations between structure of the brain and higher order behavior that goes beyond volumetry. Led by Ashish Sahoo, in collaboration with Alina Zare.

Spatial navigation ultimately requires moving through your environment. In this line of research, we compare judgments of spatial affordances in images of scenes when we ask people to indicate directions using words (e.g., ‘left’ vs. ‘right’) or have them draw paths through scenes. Using images from the SUN dataset allows us to compare these representations of spatial directions in scenes to neural data from the BOLD5000 project. Led by Hoorish Abid.

To successfully navigate in our environment, humans need to efficiently extract and comprehend spatial direction from a variety of navigation cues, like street signs, maps, and written instructions. The goals of this project are to explore how humans comprehend spatial direction, investigate how this ability degrades in normal aging and age-associated neurodegenerative disease (like Alzheimer’s), and identify the neural mechanisms supporting spatial direction comprehension. To address this, we will use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as well as advanced neuroimaging techniques (such as functional and structural connectivity and network analysis). The findings of this project will inform our basic understanding of spatial direction comprehension, particularly how it is performed in older adults who typically exhibit deficits in spatial navigation and mobility. Moreover, these results will also contribute to the development of interventions (e.g., real-time fMRI-based neurofeedback and neural stimulation) that enhance spatial direction comprehension and spatial navigation abilities. Led by Adam Barnas.

Can we improve spatial navigation ability? In this project, healthy young adults are ongoing navigation (or episodic memory) training to see whether their navigation skills can be improved. We are also relating the behavioral changes we observe after training to structural and functional changes to the human brain (measured with fMRI). Led by Lucia Cherep.

Navigation tools, like maps, compasses, and GPS devices are common in daily life. But do they help us learn large-scale spaces more easily? Given that self-report data are not fully ecologically valid in spatial cognition studies, we use cutting-edge technology to create more plausible and controlled environments to investigate our spatial abilities. In this line of research, we are investigating how effective navigation tools can be and ways to improve them. For instance, although a compass provides the same sort of directional information as other distant visual cues (like a mountain range to the West), is either actually used to learn an environment more easily? To answer these questions, we are using a virtual reality head-mounted display (HTC Vive) and an omnidirectional treadmill (Virtuix Omni VR) to create an immersive virtual environment (VE). Our participants walk on the treadmill and learn a widely-used virtual environment (Virtual Silcton) with or without various navigational cues. We then test whether they use these cues to aid in learning their surroundings and perform better on tasks that tap their large-scale spatial knowledge. This work will inform future approaches to improve and support spatial navigation behavior across individuals with vastly different spatial navigation abilities. Led by Ece Yuksel.