Warning symptoms of cognitive decline in older adults

How older people explore new spaces may indicate cognitive impairment and dementia. In the same way, Helping middle-aged people find their way more effectively may slow cognitive decline. Published in the journal Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. This is the first time a similar change in exploratory behavior during midlife has been demonstrated in humans..

The first author, Dr. Vaisah Puthusserippadi, a research fellow at the University of California, Irvine, says: “Compared with young adults, middle-aged adults tend to explore new maze environments less and appear to prioritize learning about specific important locations in the maze rather than the overall layout of the maze.”.

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 were, on average, more likely to find their way.. But the most important thing is that Additional statistical analysis revealed 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, stayed longer at decision points, and visited more objects than younger adults.”says Dr. Mary Hegarty, professor in the Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and corresponding co-author.

These differences were so noticeable that the authors were able to use artificial intelligence to predict whether the 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 provide the basis for training interventions 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 taught middle-aged people to become better at exploring new environments, focusing on traveling long distances, visiting paths that connect the environment more broadly, it could lead to improvements in their spatial memory, which could help slow their cognitive decline capabilities”.

Dr Elizabeth Christil, one of the authors and an associate professor at the same institute, looked to the future: “We are currently studying whether similar changes in behavior can be detected in scans in people at risk of Alzheimer’s disease, as well as for example: “We expect that altered scanning behavior may ultimately become a new clinical marker of early cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”