Grantee: University College London, London, UK
Researcher: Marko Nardini, Ph.D.
Grant Title: Development of human spatial cognition
https://doi.org/10.37717/220020240
Program Area: Understanding Human Cognition
Grant Type: Scholar Award
Amount: $600,000
Year Awarded: 2010
Duration: 6 years
Our earliest experiences and actions are organised in space. The nature and origin of spatial experience was a central question in epistemology and metaphysics for Newton, Leibniz, Berkeley and Kant. Our current model of the physics of the universe, in which space and time are interdependent and curved by matter, is strikingly different from our psychological concepts. Why do we have the spatial concepts that we do, and how do we acquire them? Cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience provide the tools to study the basis for human spatial cognition and behaviour. Spatial cognition can be modelled as information processing, and can also be linked directly with the functions of neuronal populations encoding spatial properties. To understand how we represent space, and why we represent space as we do, it is essential to study the emergence of spatial cognition and behaviour in infancy and childhood.
Spatial cognitive development raises three central questions. First, to what degree are different spatial concepts either innate or dependent on experience? Second, do our representations of space use only the egocentric reference frames dictated by our sensory and motor systems, or do we also possess more abstract, viewpoint-independent representations? Third, given that the human brain seems to encode spatial information in several parallel systems that may develop at different rates, how do these representations interact, and how are they selected or integrated to guide behaviour? Major new insights into these problems come from recent work characterising the neuronal basis for spatial representation and behaviour in model organisms and humans. Spatial tasks are closely comparable between species, and direct comparisons increasingly show close correspondence in their neural bases. For example, the role of the hippocampus in spatial memory and navigation has been characterised in rodents, in human patients, and in healthy humans imaged via functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while navigating in virtual reality. It has also very recently become possible to study the functional development of neuronal populations encoding spatial information in very young rats.
Studies of development of human spatial cognition have found striking dissociations in the maturation rates of different representational systems. Those enabling simple bodyreferenced and view-based recall emerge early; those enabling flexible landmark use and integration of multiple spatial information sources appear much later in childhood. Developmental research is increasingly using cue controlled environments enabling isolation of spatial representational systems identifiable with distinct neural substrates in animal models and human patients. The major challenge is to bring these approaches close enough to relate human developmental behavioural data directly to neural mechanisms of developmental change. To this end, new tasks enabling detailed separation of spatial sensory information sources will be devised, new computational models of development will be formulated, and spatial cognitive development will be studied in the wider contexts of reward-mediated behaviour and episodic memory. These new approaches will examine the elementary building blocks of human spatial cognition, how these depend on experience, and how they interact with other cognitive systems to enable adaptive behaviour.