They highlight symptoms that may warn of cognitive decline in older adults.

The way older people navigate new spaces may indicate cognitive decline and dementia. Likewise, helping middle-aged people find their way more effectively may slow cognitive decline. As published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, this is the first time similar changes in exploratory behavior during midlife have been demonstrated in humans. First author, Dr. Vaisakh Puthusserippadi, postdoctoral fellow University of California (USA) in Irvine, states: “Compared with young adults, middle-aged adults typically exhibit less exploratory activity when exploring a new maze environment and appear to prioritize exploration of specific important locations in the maze rather than the overall layout of the maze. labyrinth’.

Study design

Puthusserippadi and his team recruited 87 middle-aged women and men (average 50 years old) and 50 young adults (average 19 years old) as volunteers. None had a history of neurological disease, including dementia, or psychiatric illness. The researchers tested how well volunteers explored virtual reality mazes and learned to navigate them. The labyrinth consisted of intersections and corridors separated by hedges. Characteristic objects were scattered around them in strategic places as landmarks. In the first “exploration phase,” volunteers were tasked with freely exploring the maze and learning the locations of objects. In each of the 24 tests in the second “orientation phase,” volunteers had to apply their acquired knowledge by moving between two randomly selected objects in 45 seconds. As expected, young people had higher levels of success on average when it comes to finding your way. But more importantly, additional statistical analysis showed that this difference in success rates was partly explained by qualitative changes observed in how young and middle-aged participants learned about the maze. “Compared with young adults, middle-aged adults explored the maze less because they traveled shorter distances, paused longer at decision points, and visited more objects than younger adults,” said Dr. Mary Hegarty, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at UConn. University of Santa Barbara and corresponding co-author. These differences were so noticeable that the authors were able to predict using artificial intelligence whether a participant was middle-aged or young. Reduced scanning in middle-aged people may be due to age-related changes in the brain’s navigation network, such as the medial temporal lobe and parietal lobe. The authors suggested that these findings could inform training that could help middle-aged adults improve their navigation skills and maintain cognitive abilities. Co-author Daniela Cossio, a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine, explains: “If we could teach middle-aged people to become better at exploring new environments, focusing on traveling long distances, visiting paths that connect environments on a larger scale.” This could therefore lead to improvements in their spatial memory, which could help slow the decline of their cognitive abilities.” Dr. Elizabeth Krastil, one of the corresponding authors and an associate professor at the same institute, looked to the future: “We are currently studying whether this type Changes in behavior may be detected by scans in people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease. as well as those who actually have Alzheimer’s disease. We anticipate that changes in exploratory behavior may ultimately become a new clinical marker of early cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”