New paper in Psych Science examines age-related changes in navigation

Congratulations to Shuying Yu for her new paper featured in Psychological Science, "Age related changes in spatial navigation are evident by midlife and differ by sex." She presented a talk on her findings at the 2020 International Navigation Symposium on 10/7.

Read more about her impressive work below:

Few studies have established whether navigation deficits emerge early in the aging process (prior to age 65) or whether early age-related deficits vary by sex. This represents a critical gap in our understanding of the aging brain, especially given known changes in navigation-related brain regions during the menopausal transition. Here, we examined signatures of early aging in three navigational tasks, opening up new avenues for understanding healthy aging. Although path integration has typically been used as an early marker for dementia, our findings suggest that spatial knowledge acquisition and strategy use are more sensitive to the earliest stages of the aging process. Moving forward, using a comprehensive assessment of spatial navigation may offer a more sensitive behavioral fingerprint of a person’s dementia risk. Understanding the trajectories of healthy aging—and how they differ for men and women—will pave the way for developing behavioral and neural markers for dementia.