Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
Cognition. 2024 Sep;250:105835. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105835. Epub 2024 Jun 14.
Path integration (PI) is a navigation process that allows an organism to update its current location in reference to a starting point. PI can involve updating self-position continuously with respect to the starting point (continuous updating) or creating a map representation of the route which is then used to compute the homing vector (configural updating). One of the brain areas involved in PI, the entorhinal cortex, is modulated similarly by whole-body and eye movements, suggesting that if PI updates self-position, an analogous process may be used to update gaze position, and may undergo age-related changes. Here, we created an eyetracking version of a PI task in which younger and older participants followed routes with their eyes as guided by visual onsets; at the end of each route, participants were cued to return to the starting point or another enroute location. When only memory for the starting location was required for successful task performance, younger and older adults were generally not influenced by the number of locations, indicative of continuous updating. However, when participants could be cued to any enroute location, thereby requiring memory for the entire route, processing times increased, accuracy decreased, and overt revisits to enroute locations increased with the number of locations in a route, indicative of configural updating. Older participants showed evidence for similar updating strategies as younger participants, but they were less accurate and made more overt revisits to mid-route locations. These findings suggest that spatial updating mechanisms are generalizable across effector systems.
路径整合（PI）是一种导航过程，使生物体能够根据起点更新其当前位置。PI 可以涉及连续更新相对于起点的自我位置（连续更新），或创建路线的地图表示，然后使用该地图表示来计算归巢向量（构型更新）。参与 PI 的大脑区域之一，内嗅皮层，也受到全身和眼球运动的类似调节，这表明如果 PI 更新自我位置，则类似的过程可能用于更新注视位置，并且可能会随着年龄的增长而发生变化。在这里，我们创建了一个眼球追踪版本的 PI 任务，其中年轻和年长的参与者通过视觉起始来引导眼睛沿着路线；在每条路线的末尾，参与者被提示返回起点或另一个中途位置。当成功完成任务仅需要记忆起点位置时，年轻和年长的成年人通常不受位置数量的影响，这表明是连续更新。然而，当参与者可以被提示到任何中途位置时，因此需要记忆整个路线，处理时间增加，准确性降低，并且在路线中位置数量增加时，明显的中途位置重访增加，表明是构型更新。年长的参与者表现出与年轻参与者类似的更新策略，但准确性较低，并且在中途位置的明显重访更多。这些发现表明空间更新机制在效应器系统中具有通用性。
