Ricerc@Sapienza

Spatial navigation tasks reveal small differences between normal and pathological aging and may thus disclose potential neuropsychological predictors of neurodegenerative diseases. The aim of our study was to investigate which navigational skills are compromised in the early phase of pathological aging as well as the extent to which they are compromised. We performed an extensive neuropsychological evaluation based on working memory and learning tasks (i.e., Corsi Block-Tapping Test and Walking Corsi Test) involving both reaching and navigational vista spaces.

Environmental navigation entails the constant integration of information across space and time; however, the relation between spatial and temporal features involved in wayfinding has not been fully established yet. Here we investigated how two key spatio-temporal aspects of navigation – namely the processing of information concerning the order of landmarks along a route, and the duration of tracts connecting the same landmarks – relate to different types of navigational learning.