Spatial Navigation Test Battery

Developmental prosopagnosia with concurrent topographical difficulties: A case report and virtual reality training programme

“…Such an investigation would also be of particular value given that topographical disorientation deficits following brain injury appear to have a broad range of underpinnings, where various taxonomies have identified difficulties in landmark and scene recognition, as well as in the processing of spatial relationships or the formation and retrieval of cognitive maps (e.g. Aguirre & D'Esposito, 1999;Arnold et al, 2013;De Renzi, 1982;Liu et al, 2011). This variability in acquired cases is unsurprising given the widespread nature of brain lesions: landmark agnosia has been associated with damage to right ventral temporo-occipital cortex (McCarthy, Evans, & Hodges, 1996;Pai, 1997), scene categorization with the transverse occipital sulcus (Bettencourt & Xu, 2013;Dilks, Julian, Paunov, & Kanwisher, 2013), and both processes to the parahippocampal place area (O'Craven & Kanwisher, 2000;Epstein, Harris, Stanley, & Kanwisher, 1999).…”

“…One common association with AP is topographical disorientation (the inability to orient and navigate in familiar and unfamiliar surroundings: Berthoz, 2001;Wang & Spelke, 2002), where many objective (Hécaen & Angelergues, 1962;Aguirre & D'Esposito, 1999;Landis, Cummings, Benson & Palmer, 1986) and anecdotal (Barton, Press, Keenan, & O'Connor, 2002;Bauer, 1984;Malone, Morris, Kay, & Levin, 1982;Takahashi, Kawamura, Hirayama, Shiota, & Isono, 1995;Schmidt, 2015) reports suggest a long-standing relationship. These difficulties can be underpinned by impaired landmark and/or scene recognition, or by difficulties in the representation of spatial relationships (Aguirre & D'Esposito, 1999;Arnold et al, 2013;De Renzi, 1982;Liu, Levy, Barton, & Iaria, 2011).…”

The Rapid Sense of Direction (RSOD) Scale: a short and reliable measure of sense of direction.

“…This test, as the one described above, also assesses the ability of individuals to generate and use a mental representation of the environment (and the spatial relationship between environmental landmarks) (i.e., a cognitive map) (Tolman, 1948) for the purpose of orientation and navigation (Arnold et al, 2013). However, in this task, the environment consists of a virtual city composed of a 5x5 rectangular grid of buildings, with four distinct environmental landmarks (Arnold et al, 2013) (see Figure 1). The task consists of a maximum number of 12 trials.…”

“…More recently, computerized assessments utilizing virtual environments have drastically increased the feasibility of assessing large-scale spatial orientation skills in controlled laboratory settings (Arnold et al, 2013;Friedman et al, 2019;Miller & Carlson, 2011;Weisberg et al, 2014), but these tasks are often complex, long, have not been validated, and involve uncertainty regarding the constructs measured (Uttal et al, 2024), making them ill-suited for rapid clinical assessment or as complementary or secondary scientific measures.…”