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2-083 - How do navigational skills develop in typical and atypical populations?

Fri, March 22, 10:00 to 11:30am, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 3, Room 344

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Our ability to navigate is crucial to everyday living. However, in the study of developing navigational abilities there is often a separation between research with typically and atypically developing populations. This integrated symposium will work towards bridging that gap. Here, we present four studies that use recently pioneered methods to further our understanding of developing navigation. Presentation 1 introduces a relatively unexplored theoretical distinction between two forms of allocentric coding, which show different rates of development in 3.5- to 5.5-year-olds in a virtual reality (VR) task. Presentation 2 establishes the use of Pavlovian trace EyeBlink Conditioning as a novel biomarker of 3- to 6-year-old’s hippocampal-dependent spatial reorientation strategies, suggesting a key role for the hippocampus in developing spatial performance. The final two studies focus on populations for whom hippocampal function is impaired. Presentation 3 compares individuals with Down syndrome (DS), Intellectual Disability, and typically developing (TD) children using VR, and reports new dissociations between implicit and explicit configural knowledge in these groups. Presentation 4 compares individuals with Williams syndrome, DS, and TD individuals, and reveals new between-population differences in exploration strategies when searching for targets in a VR town. In summary, these studies further our insight into the mechanisms underlying navigation: the memory strategies used, neural substrates employed, type of configural knowledge acquired, and exploration strategies used. The symposium introduces key new methodological advances and will crucially provide a forum to discuss how studies of TD populations can inform our understanding of atypical populations and vice versa.

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