Research
The SCANN Lab conducts research on the cognitive neuroscience of human spatial navigation. We use functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging, virtual reality, and behavioral approaches from cognitive psychology to study how people navigate and why people vary in their navigation abilities, including across ages (healthy younger and older adults) and in the course of Alzheimer’s disease.
See our publications and resources pages for more. Or see below for a rundown of our current projects.
We also would like to acknowledge our funders: the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, the National Institute on Aging, National Institute on Neurological Disorders and Stroke, the National Science Foundation, and the Florida Department of Health.
How can we support and enhance navigation?
People have designed many different tools to help us find our way around. These include language, arrows, maps, and of course global positioning systems. But how do we convert these abstract representations into something we can use to actually move through the world? Might these tools provide a way forward to support people who lose their ability to navigate? Are they crutches that, when used in excess, deplete our spatial mental resources? Our research takes a bespoke approach to this question. Each person and each environment might need specific support structures in place to promote better navigation. We are also looking at how navigation ability might be trained, so that anyone can navigate more effectively across situations.
What can virtual environments teach us about navigation?
We investigate the cues people use to solve the problem of spatial navigation, and how the brain integrates this information into spatial representations. Virtual environments allow us to carefully curate the information available to navigators as they learn new environments. We can also replicate our findings across sites and across time; something impossible to do in real-world navigation studies.
Why do we all navigate differently?
What makes some people excellent navigators – seemingly never lost and always oriented – while others struggle even in familiar environments? Navigation requires the use of many distinct skills, each of which differs across individuals. With such variability we would say there is no such thing as a “typical” navigator. Rather, each of us brings their own approach to learning, remembering, and navigating the world. Through virtual and real-world experiments combined with neuroimaging and qualitative interviews, we seek to understand why.
How does aging affect spatial memory?
As we age, our ability (and perhaps desire) to navigate the world changes. Where younger adults can stay oriented, even in complex environments, older adults sometimes struggle to navigate even familiar places. Our work seeks to understand the neural changes that underlie these age differences. By examining the aging brain in more detail, we can also gain insight into how we might specifically be able to improve navigation behavior in older individuals.