Erica Ward will be beginning her 10-week DHS-WIRED Internship Program at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in the summer of 2024. She will be involved on projects involving Concept and Application Evaluation (i.e., using physics, mathematics, statistics, and quantitative evaluation and assessment) and Analytics (i.e., political science, public policy and international relations, criminal justice, and policy analysis). Alongside her engaging research internship opportunities, she will be involved in professional development opportunities and networking to further her STEM career.

Find out more information about her internship here.

Congrats, Erica!

Dr. Vaisakh Puthusseryppady’s and Daniela Cossio’s commentary highlighting the importance and implications of Zheng et al.’s finding about the hippocampal subregion CA1 as it relates to the spatial decline in older adults was recently published in PNAS!

Zheng et al. found that the neural mechanisms underlying spatial memory involve both age-related and age-invariant factors. Altered signal input into the hippocampal CA1 region was associated with age, but the fidelity of neural activation patterns in CA1 was not – both young and older adults with greater signal fidelity had better spatial discrimination. This suggests strategies to improve spatial memory ability could benefit those at risk for Alzheimer’s, as the disease pathology affects brain regions critical for spatial navigation. Vaisakh and Daniela also suggest that future studies may focus on training individuals to identify unique environmental features could strengthen pathways for better spatial memory, as individuals with superior spatial memory are better at differentiating between environments regardless of age.

Puthusseryppady, V., Cossio, D., & Chrastil, E.R. (2024). Spatial memory and hippocampal remapping: Who will age well? Proceedings of the National Academy of Science 121(3), e2319952121

Puthusseryppady, V., Cossio, D., & Chrastil, E.R. (2024)

You (Lily) Cheng’s paper titled “(Don’t) Look Where You Are Going: Evidence for a Travel Direction Signal in Humans That Is Independent of Head Direction” was recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General! Here, she challenges the common assumption that these two factors are redundant, arguing that they provide different spatial information. The study uses a novel motion adaptation paradigm from visual neuroscience, designed to isolate the effect of travel direction from head direction. The results show high-level aftereffects of perceived travel direction, suggesting that travel direction is a crucial component of human navigation. Interestingly, the study found a higher frequency of reporting perceived travel toward the adapted direction, an aftereffect that contradicts low-level motion aftereffects. This effect persisted even after controlling for potential response biases and approaching effects, and it increased with the duration of adaptation. These findings provide the first evidence of how a pure travel direction signal might be represented in humans, independently of head direction!

Cheng, Y., Ling, S., Stern, C.E., Huang, A. & Chrastil, E.R. (2024). (Don’t) look where you are going: Evidence for a travel direction signal in humans that is independent of head direction. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 153(4), 1038-1052.

Cheng, Y., Ling, S., Stern, C.E., Huang, A. & Chrastil, E.R.(2024)

Liz Chrastil presented at the fourth NIH Cognitive Aging Summit held on March 20th, 2024! Here, she discussed our lab’s findings with regards to Human spatial navigation during midlife: Sex differences in behavior and circuitry, and addressed the following questions:

1. How do navigation abilities change during early aging?
2. Do the circuits that are associated with navigation change as we age?
3. How do sex differences in navigation change during the course of aging?
4. Do any changes in navigation ability relate to the menopausal transition?
5. Can we use navigation as a tool to determine risk for dementia, especially for women?

Overall, the NIH Cognitive Aging Summit gathered scientific presentations and discussion of age-related brain and cognitive change, with a particular focus on individual differences and the development of personalized approaches to the remediation of decline and the maintenance of health.

We would like to congratulate Vaisakh Puthusseryppady for being offered, and accepting an assistant professorship at Tilburg University in the School of Social & Behavioral Sciences! Starting in September 2024 as a Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology, Vaisakh plans on developing a research program specifically looking at the early identification of Alzheimer’s disease using spatial navigation as a behavioral biomarker, as well as developing cognitive training interventions to improve navigation ability in the aging population.

Vaisakh has been studying aspects of Alzheimer’s disease identification and navigation ability in the midlife-older populations since starting his postdoctoral position here in the Spatial Neuroscience Lab in 2021.

We’re excited to see his future findings and wish him the best at Tilburg University in the fall!

The Institutional National Research Service Award (T32) is a training grant for predoctoral and postdoctoral trainees to prepare for careers with significant impact in health-related research. Daniela was recently awarded this grant for the Training in the Neurobiology of Aging and Alzheimer’s Disease program specifically, which, according to their grant description online, involves the “preparation and instruction in the application of molecular and quantitative approaches to the elucidation of the cellular and molecular mechanisms of age-related neurodegeneration, brain plasticity, and learning and memory.” The training program will involve an extensive curriculum, close mentorship, and collaborative learning. Congrats, Daniela!

Dr. Chrastil, in collaboration with Jeff Krichmar (UCI, Department of Cognitive Sciences) and Doug Nitz (UCSD, Department of Cognitive Sciences), has been awarded a $1.5 million RO1 grant from the National Institute of Health (NIH) for their proposed study, “Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience: There and back again – Linking global maps to first-person perspectives.”

This study specifically focuses on the cognitive function that enables humans to link first-person perspectives with a global map. This ability to seamlessly transition between both perspectives is crucial for navigation and flexible perspective-taking.

Congratulations to Dr. Chrastil, Krichmar, and Nitz!

Ph.D. candidate Theo Kapogianis completed his Advancement Defense on 09/11/2023, proposing his dissertation “Cognitive Graphs: it’s all connected man. Impact of structure, decision-making, and domain on graph learning”! He proposed three experiments which will investigate 1) structure: components of graphs (informational networks), such as size, edge-to-node ratio, internal complexity and organization. 2) decision-making: the role of decision-making in learning and the brain structures which support learning through decision-making. 3) domain: how learning strategies change over time across different task pressures (repetitive or random) and domains (spatial or abstract).

We look forward to hearing about Theo’s findings across his three experiments. Great job Theo!