Liz and Lily presented at the 61st annual Psychonomic Society meeting, which happened virtually on November 19-22, 2020. Lily and Liz both authored the poster discussing The Emergence of Head Direction Signals in Human Navigation.

Liz also gave a talk at the meeting, discussing her work on Individual Differences in Wayfinding Strategies in Real and Virtual Environments. The full list of authors on this talk were, Mary Hegarty (University of California, Santa Barbara), Chuanxiuyue He (UCSB), Alexander P. Boone (Oregon State University), and Elizabeth R. Chrastil (University of California, Irvine).

Lily presented her research, Travel Direction as a Fundamental Component of Human Navigation, at Neuromatch Conference 3.0 on October 30th, 2020.

A video recording of her presentation can be found on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMSzHMW_kgQ
(1:41-1:55)

Ph.D. candidate and graduate student in the Spatial Neuroscience Lab at UCI, Lily Cheng, presented her work, Travel Direction as a Fundamental Component of Human Navigation, at the 3rd virtual Interdisciplinary Navigation Symposium  (iNAV 2020) this past October 5th-7th.

The research investigated the role of travel direction in the internal representation system of human navigation using a visual motion adaptation paradigm in virtual reality.
Great job Lily!

Additionally, Ph.D. student at our associate lab, UCSB Jacob’s Lab , Shuying Yu, presented her work, Sex Differences and Age-Related Changes in Spatial Navigation also at iNAV 2020.

The research investigated healthy young and midlife men and women on three different aspects of spatial navigation (path integration, acquisition of spatial knowledge, and navigational strategy) in order to investigate whether navigational deficits emerge earlier in the aging process or whether these age-related changes vary by sex. Results revealed three major findings: 1) path integration ability is preserved through midlife and does not differ by sex; 2) robust sex differences in spatial knowledge acquisition are observed in young adulthood, which persist but are diminished with age; and 3) by midlife men and women show decreased ability to acquire spatial knowledge and an increased reliance on taking habitual paths. Together, the findings indicated that age-related changes in navigation ability and strategy are evident by midlife.
Great job Shuying!

The Chrastil Lab, along with collaborators Jeff Krichmar, Craig Stark, and Mary Hegarty, were awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation, “Advantages of varying navigational abilities in humans and robots.”
The award will take a full-scale examination of individual differences in navigational ability, from both brain and behavior, and then connecting that to make robots with similar variation.

The Chrastil Lab was awarded a grant from UCI MIND/Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement for “Sex differences in spatial navigation during aging.”
Women have higher rates of dementia than men. Their large sex differences in navigation is a promising early marker for dementia, and the lab will be studying these factors together across the midlife and older adult lifespan.

Ph.D. Candidate and Graduate Student in the Spatial Neuroscience Lab, Lily Cheng, publishes paper Telling Right from Right: The Influence of Handedness in the Mental Rotation of Hands in Cognitive Research.

Congrats Lily!

https://cognitiveresearchjournal.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s41235-020-00230-9

The Spatial Neuroscience Lab’s very own, Ph.D. student Lily Cheng, completed her Advancement Defense in March 2020!
She proposed a series of studies to understand the role of travel direction in the navigation process, as well as how and where travel direction information is coded in the brain.

Great job Lily!

Check out and subscribe to the Spatial Neuroscience Lab’s new channel on YouTube!

We will be posting all things relating to navigation, virtual reality, memory, and learning. Also take a look at the new playlist of videos discussing sex differences in navigation!

UCI Spatial Neuroscience Lab

The UCI Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory (CNLM) is hosting Brain Awareness Week (virtually) this week from March 16th-22nd!

Check out the video below to get a sneak peek of what we are all about here in the Chrastil Lab and at CAVERN!