Ricerc@Sapienza

Planning ability is fundamental for goal-directed spatial navigation. Preliminary findings
from patients and healthy individuals suggest that travel planning (TP)—namely,
navigational planning—can be considered a distinct process from visuospatial planning
(VP) ability. To shed light on this distinction, two right brain-damaged patients without
hemineglect were compared with a control group on two tasks aimed at testing VP
(i.e., Tower of London-16, ToL-16) and TP (i.e., Minefield Task, MFT). The former requires

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.

To successfully navigate within an environment, individuals have to organize the spatial information in terms of salient landmarks, paths and general layout of the navigational environment.