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At NeuroLab we make use of neuroimaging, genetic, behavioral and neuropsychological approaches to investigate the cognitive skills and neural mechanisms underlying the human ability to orient and navigate in the surrounding. We are interested in understanding the fundamental mechanisms related to spatial cognition throughout the life span (from early development to the elderly) and in the event of clinical conditions affecting the central nervous system. We have many projects that may interest you. Explore our website to find out more about our research!

 

Our most recent publication

COGNITIVE MAPPING IN HUMANS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO OTHER ORIENTATION SKILLS
Aiden EGF Arnold, Ford Burles, Taisya Krivoruchko, Irene Liu, Colin D Rey, Richard M Levy & Giuseppe Iaria (2012). Exp Brain Res, Nov 3 [Epub ahead of print]

Human orientation in novel and familiar environments is a complex skill that can involve numerous different strategies. To date, a comprehensive account of how these strategies interrelate at the behavioural level has not been documented, impeding the development of elaborate systems neuroscience models of spatial orientation. Here, we describe a virtual environment test battery designed to assess five of the core strategies used by humans to orient. Our results indicate that the ability to form a cognitive map is highly related to more basic orientation strategies, supporting previous proposals that encoding a cognitive map requires inputs from multiple domains of spatial processing. These findings provide a topology of numerous primary orientation strategies used by humans during orientation and will allow researchers to elaborate on neural models of spatial cognition that currently do not account for how different orientation strategies integrate over time based on environmental conditions.



















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