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 👇

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…

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/hi…

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.

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/hi…

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. nature.com/articles/s4156…

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?doi…

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

Ashish Sahoo, Poster II-080 on Friday @ 12pm Ashish presents a meta-analysis examining the correlation between HPC volume and nav/memory performance. The work-in-progress shows a weak relation, but also publication bias Ashish is on the job market and looking for post-docs!

Ece Yuksel, Poster I-073 on Thursday @ 6pm Ece presents a qual/quant study in which she asks younger and older adults about their actual navigation behavior (and combines this with their performance on Virtual Silcton.) Ece is on the job market and looking for post-docs!

The SCANN Lab will be at @Psychonomic_Soc this week (except for @stevenmweisberg - he's stuck in Texas.) If you're there, connect with our awesome PhD students! And if you're NOT there, you can still follow our work. scannlab.org/psynom-2025 More info in the Tweets below!