Speaker
Description
The maturation of spatially tuned cells in the hippocampus has been reliably linked to the development of superior navigational strategies and spatial memory in rodent models. However, evidence for a corresponding maturation process in humans lags behind due to methodological limitations. So far, we adapted a virtual 3-D spatial navigation task for children and adolescents and conducted a behavioral pilot study. I will present its results on common measures of spatial accuracy, bias towards cue locations, precision, internal consistency, and search strategy as well as potential confounds as functions of age in two cross-sectional samples. I will then outline a roadmap of how to bring the task into the MR scanner to obtain data on the volumes of the hippocampal subfields and the direction- and speed-dependent modulation of the BOLD (blood oxygen level dependent) signal in the entorhinal ROI (region of interest).
