SCANN Lab

🚨The SCANN Lab @ UTA is hiring a postdoctoral researcher!🚨 Topics: 🧭 spatial navigation, 🧠 fMRI, 🎮 VR, 👵 cognitive aging. Start date: Nov 2025 (flexible). Salary: NIH levels. Details 👇

The SCANN Lab is officially extramurally funded at UTA! Dr. Weisberg and Dr. Hunter Ball, received a grant from the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities to study GPS-supported navigation and support leadership development through the ASCENDR Leadership Program.

We recently wrote on these ideas too! In a chapter published in the Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, we dive into how these differences emerge from navigation strategies and underlying cognitive systems: osf.io/9x6a3

Why do some people never get lost while others rely on GPS? A new review, written by Hugo Spiers and @Emre_Yavuz_21 nature.com/articles/s4415… argues that navigation ability is shaped by both fixed factors (age, genetics) and modifiable ones (sleep, exercise, experience).

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

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: msn.com/en-us/money/ge…

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/10.100…

and 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

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

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/hi…

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: uta.edu/news/news-rele…

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/0Z5owV… 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. @talia_konkle @jeongho__park jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?a…

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).

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. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…