Journal
CEREBRAL CORTEX
Volume 25, Issue 9, Pages 3122-3131Publisher
OXFORD UNIV PRESS INC
DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhu107
Keywords
age; brain; fractal dimensionality; hippocampus; spatial navigation
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Funding
- National Institutes of Health [R37 AG-011230, T32 HS-013819]
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Studies of human navigation in virtual maze environments have consistently linked advanced age with greater distance traveled between the start and the goal and longer duration of the search. Observations of search path geometry suggest that routes taken by older adults may be unnecessarily complex and that excessive path complexity may be an indicator of cognitive difficulties experienced by older navigators. In a sample of healthy adults, we quantify search path complexity in a virtual Morris water maze with a novel method based on fractal dimensionality. In a two-level hierarchical linear model, we estimated improvement in navigation performance across trials by a decline in route length, shortening of search time, and reduction in fractal dimensionality of the path. While replicating commonly reported age and sex differences in time and distance indices, a reduction in fractal dimension of the path accounted for improvement across trials, independent of age or sex. The volumes of brain regions associated with the establishment of cognitive maps (para-hippocampal gyrus and hippocampus) were related to path dimensionality, but not to the total distance and time. Thus, fractal dimensionality of a navigational path may present a useful complementary method of quantifying performance in navigation.
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