When was the last time you paid attention to your commute? And I don’t mean a couple of feet in front of you, at the car merging into your lane without a blinker. I mean really paid attention to the route you take.
Did you see the landmarks in the distance that make up the city skyline? Did you drive right past the grocery store you promised to stop by at the corner of this Peachtree Street or that Peachtree Street, a struggle Atlanta locals know well?
“Oops! Force of habit,” you might say to yourself as you miss your turn and begin to think about when and where you can turn around.
Relying on familiarity can either facilitate or impede daily navigation. As a researcher studying memory and navigation, I aim to understand how the brain supports spatial navigation and what happens if the cognitive mechanisms for choosing the best route home begin to decline, such as during stress or with aging.
Humans are creatures of habit – at least that’s what people tell themselves when wary of trying something new. But what if a new route is faster or safer than the one you usually take? Would you try it?
Research from my team suggests that people balance between exploration and habit – that is, trying something new or sticking with the familiar – when deciding what route to take. Which navigation strategy someone chooses depends not only on their spatial abilities but on their network of brain regions that support navigation.
When was the last time you paid attention to the scenery of your usual commute?
Boonchai Wedmakawand/Moment via Getty Images
A spatial blueprint
Spatial navigation refers to the cognitive ability that helps you travel from one location to another. It may sound simple, but it requires using cognitive functions such as memory, attention, decision-making and assessing potential rewards – never mind the ability to simply perceive the environment itself.
Spatial navigation uses memories of things you consciously experienced. Two types of memory relevant to navigation are what scientists call episodic and semantic.
For example, you might retrieve an episodic memory about a specific event: remembering a detour you took a week ago to drop a package off at the post office, including the traffic and weather that day.
You might also retrieve a semantic memory that’s more factual and knowledge-based: remembering how many blocks away the post office is from the park and the turns you need to make to get there.
Together, these kinds of memory inform your spatial memory, which allows you to retrieve location information. This could be where buildings are in relation to each other or where objects are situated in your house. Spatial memories help form your cognitive map, which is essential for getting around in the world.
Often, these different ways of remembering interact, and you can use one type of memory to inform the other. For example, you’ve become accustomed to…
