Large-scale assessment of human navigation ability across the lifespan

Abstract

Large-scale assessment of human navigation ability across the lifespan ineke J. M. van der Ham * , Michiel H. G. claessen, Andrea W. M. evers & Milan n. A. van der Kuil navigation ability is particularly sensitive to aging. evidence of aging patterns is largely restricted to comparing young adults and elderly and limited in the variety of navigation tasks used. therefore, we designed a novel task battery to assess navigation ability in a very large, representative sample (n = 11,887, 8-100 years). The main aim was to measure navigation ability across the lifespan in a brief, yet comprehensive manner. tasks included landmark knowledge, egocentric and allocentric location knowledge, and path knowledge for a route and survey perspective. Additionally, factors that potentially contribute to navigation ability were considered; gender, spatial experience and spatial anxiety. increase in performance with age in children was found for allocentric location knowledge and for route-based path knowledge. Age related decline was found for all five tasks, each with clearly discernible aging patterns, substantiated the claim that each task distinctively contributes to the assessment of navigation ability. this study provides an in depth examination of navigation ability across dissociable functional domains and describes cognitive changes across the lifespan. the outcome supports the use of this task battery for brief assessment of navigation for experimental and clinical purposes.

Learning My Way: A Pilot Study of Navigation Skills in Cerebral Palsy in Immersive Virtual Reality

“…Spatial navigation refers to the ability to maintain a sense of direction/location while moving around in the environment in order to find one's way. It includes abilities such as orienting in complex environments, perceiving distance and planning routes to distant locations as well as mentally representing the reciprocal relations of landmarks in space (Lawton, 2010;Wolbers and Hegarty, 2010;van der Ham et al, 2020). Several cognitive abilities underpin navigation skills, including longterm memory (Spiers and Maguire, 2008), executive functions (Lithfous et al, 2013;Ruggiero et al, 2016), precision in encoding multisensorial (visual, vestibular, and proprioceptive) experiences, as well as the ability to form mental representations used to guide behavior (Bianchini et al, 2014).…”

“…Human navigation abilities largely vary across subjects, change with age, and develop gradually in time (Siegel and White, 1975;Lehnung et al, 2003;van der Ham et al, 2020), from ES to AS during childhood, that goes along with the ability to combine perceptual experience into a unitary representation (Siegel and White, 1975;Acredolo, 1978). The cognitive mapping knowledge develops gradually and is not fully functioning until the age of 10 years (Lehnung et al, 1998).…”

“…Indeed, non-immersive VR systems have been increasingly used in children and adults to assess navigation skills (Iglói et al, 2009;Bullens et al, 2010;Cogne et al, 2017Cogne et al, , 2018Coutrot et al, 2018;Leon et al, 2018;Negen et al, 2018;van der Ham et al, 2020). In particular, Iglói et al (2009) developed a pc-based adaptation of the StarMaze to examine the learning strategies in a dynamic situation.…”

Vector-based pedestrian navigation in cities

“…In the real world, these costs may be a combination of mental and physical effort 10 ; for example, the mental cost of planning a route comes with the physical cost of travel. Multiple studies have investigated aggregate mobility flows [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] and the cognitive abilities that support navigation [22][23][24][25][26][27][28][29] . Quantitative models of how humans may plan their routes in real cities have also been proposed, although these are limited to a small neighborhood in which the planning problem could be optimally solved with exhaustive route enumeration by a 'breadth-first search' 4 .…”

Robot navigation as hierarchical active inference

“…Humans easily explore and map their surroundings without much extra thought or considerations. Intuitively we build a logically consistent map without needing accurate distance measurements [4]. We find it natural to think about navigation in terms of a sequence of moves towards locations.…”