Zoe Cronin recently presented her research proposal at the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) annual meeting. Here’s the link to her poster: www.scannlab.org/resources-it...

Individuals with aphantasia have difficulty forming mental imagery, and with her future research, Zoe aims to develop more inclusive methods for teaching complex concepts to students.

Zoe Cronin, our first year PhD student at SCANN lab was recently interviewed by Dallas Morning News where she discusses a condition known as aphantasia and its relationship to spatial cognition.

Read more on this here: www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

They emphasize the importance of open science, standardizing navigation assessment methods, and focusing more on real-world challenges in navigation, particularly those experienced by older adults.

A recent book on navigation, “Challenges in Navigation Research”, includes a final chapter that was co-authored by Dr. Weisberg. In that chapter, the authors propose a framework for future research in the field.

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

RSC was successful at decoding categories during the approach-avoidance task as well as at task decoding. These findings suggest that activity in these scene selective regions is not fixed and is influenced by behavioral goals.

Participants performed a categorization (classify scenes by type) and approach-avoidance task (decide whether or not to approach a scene). Results showed that OPA had the highest category decoding, OPA and PPA were successful at decoding categories during the categorization task

Task-modulated neural responses in scene-selective regions of the human brain The study of scene perception is crucial to the understanding of how one interprets and interacts with their environment, and how the environment impa…

In their study, Koc et al. looked at how scene selective brain regions (PPA, OPA, RSC) change their activity depending on behavioral goals.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

They showed that contextual changes (such as adding novel wall, ceiling and floor colors and textures) led to greater overestimation of distance judgments, followed by global geometric changes, while local geometric changes had weaker effects.

In this recently published study, the researchers manipulated geometric and contextual cues in a virtual environment and observed their effects on participants’ distance judgments.

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

UTA researcher uses AI to rethink navigation skills UTA researcher finds no clear link between brain structure and navigation ability in young adults

Dr. Weisberg explains how using AI to investigate the relationship between brain structure and navigational abilities suggests that there might not be any relation between the two as previously thought. Read more on this news article here: www.uta.edu/news/news-re...

How Humans Find Their Way: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Navigation

Dr. Weisberg just went on his first professional podcast! Tune in to hear about how people navigate, why GPS can help OR hurt, and what aging teaches us about flexibility and strategy.
Give it a listen!
open.spotify.com/episode/0Z5o...

And reach out! We'd love to hear what you think.

In other words, memory seems to be biased toward a familiar or preferred way of seeing a scene or object, and then the brain expands or contracts the memory of what we have seen to match that preferred view.

They showed that this transition point was not related to how far away the viewer is, but rather to the view that people considered to “look best” (cont.)

As we move away from an object our view shifts along a continuum from object (when we are close) to scene (when we are far away). Park et al. examined this continuum.
@taliakonkle.bsky.social
jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

Their behavioral testing also confirmed that people generally rate concave shapes more as scenes compared to convex ones. This is consistent with the idea that scenes are perceived as something that we can act within (hence the concavity).

Concavity as a diagnostic feature of visual scenes Despite over two decades of research on the neural mechanisms underlying human visual scene, or place, processing, it remains unknown what exactly a “…

Using concave versus convex images of scenes and objects, this article found that PPA corresponds more strongly to concave scenes/objects compared to convex ones. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Although the discovery happened decades earlier, the ability to synchronize the animal’s location with neural firing using newly developed technology led to greater acceptance of place cells and the concept of a cognitive map (although controversial) in the scientific community.

Here, John O'keefe, the 2014 Nobel Prize winner, describes the process of discovering hippocampal place cells that led to his Nobel Prize. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

As the paper notes, the reason for this behavior in older rats (and in humans) is still unclear. Anatomically, this might be due to reliance on extra-hippocampus circuits rather than circus within the hippocampus which typically support allocentric strategies.

Older Rats Switch Between Distinctly Different Behavior Strategies to Solve the Spatial Version of the Morris Watermaze It has been established that aged rats are worse at learning the spatial version of the Morris watermaze task compared to their younger counterparts. It remains unclear, however, whether this poorer ...

Using the Morris Watermaze, researchers found that younger rats converge on allocentric strategies earlier in the trials, while older rats continue switching between allocentric and egocentric strategies until the last trial.
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

This shows how well a space is encoded correlates with better encoding of new information encountered in that space. Smaller spaces with more corners tend to be better remembered. These findings could inform environmental design, especially for those with impaired navigation.

In this recent study, the researchers looked at the usefulness of spaces as placeholders for memories. They assessed how well different spaces are encoded and how well an object within those spaces is remembered at a later time.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

This study shows leisure activities support domain-specific protection against cognitive decline in visual attention and memory beyond job type & education. Given the role of these processes in spatial navigation, such activities might preserve navigational abilities with aging.

New findings suggest memory framing effects are more complex than previously thought and may not require emotional arousal:
psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?d...

Ece Yuksel presented her poster “Age differences in spatial navigation across real and virtual worlds: A mixed-methods approach” at Psychonomic Society 2025, for which she was awarded the Graduate Travel Award. See all SCANN Lab Psychonomic posters here: scannlab.org/psynom-2025

4 smiling people in a wintry icicle like landscape

We are now spread across three institutions, but the SCANN LAN is now reunited at @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

@eceyuksel.bsky.social @adamjbarnas.com @chengsiy.bsky.social

Representing the MemoLab at Psychonomics, Valentina Krenz will be presenting tomorrow, poster II-153, on the effects of retrieval practice on memory precision 🌠

I will be presenting my latest endeavor on spatial navigation strategy optimization featuring RL modeling and a new DSP task!
And here's link to our fleet: scannlab.org/psynom-2025

See you around the Poster session I at I-069!
@scannlab.bsky.social
@psychonomicsociety.bsky.social
#psynom25

Ashish Sahoo, Poster II-080 on Friday @ 12pm

Ashish presents a meta-analysis examining the correlation between hippocampal volume and navigation and memory performance. The work-in-progress shows a weak relation, but also publication bias

Ashish is also on the job market and looking for post-docs!