The way we explore our environment may contribute to healthier brain aging, according to a new study, a discovery that could provide new ways to halt cognitive decline and even biomarkers for the early diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease.
Spatial navigation is a skill we use every day, yet it tends to decline as we age. Historically, this decline in navigational ability has been attributed to a deterioration in spatial memory, but new research suggests that it may also be due to changes in how we explore new environments.
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“Compared to younger people, middle-aged people appear to engage in less exploratory behavior overall when learning a new maze environment and prioritize learning specific key locations within the maze over the overall layout of the maze,” Vaisakh Puthusserippadi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement.
A new study published in the journal The forefront of aging neurosciencePuthusserippady and his colleagues recruited a group of 87 middle-aged volunteers, with an average age of 50, and 50 younger volunteers, with an average age of 19. The volunteers were then asked to explore and learn how to navigate a maze in virtual reality.
The maze consisted of corridors and intersections separated by hedges, with distinctive objects scattered in strategic locations. Volunteers were free to explore the maze and then asked to navigate between two randomly selected objects.
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Perhaps unsurprisingly, younger volunteers were, on average, more successful at finding their way, but what really stood out were the differences in how younger and older participants learned to navigate new environments.
“Compared to younger people, middle-aged people explored the maze environment less, traveled shorter distances, paused longer at decision points, and visited more objects than younger people,” Mary Hegarty, a professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara and co-corresponding author of the paper, said in a statement.
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These differences were so striking that the researchers were able to use artificial intelligence to accurately predict which group each individual would fall into (young or middle-aged) based solely on their navigation learning patterns.
So why do we see these changes in exploratory behavior with age? The researchers say it could have to do with how navigational networks in the brain change with age. If this is the case, the researchers hypothesized that older adults could be trained with simple navigation exercises to maintain “young” brain networks.
“Training middle-aged people to better explore new environments, with an emphasis on traveling further and exploring more connected paths, may improve spatial memory and help slow cognitive decline,” study co-author Daniela Coccio, a doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, said in a statement.
These findings may also have implications for age-related neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s disease.
“We are now investigating whether these changes in exploratory behavior can be seen not only in people at risk for Alzheimer’s, but also in people who actually have the disease,” corresponding author Elisabeth Krustil, an associate professor at the Institute, said in a statement.
“We hope that changes in exploratory behavior may ultimately become a novel clinical marker of early cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer’s disease.”
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