Congratulations to Dr. Weisberg on receiving 2026 Early Career Award from the Psychonomic Society! We're excited to celebrate this well deserved recognition of his significant contributions to the field. @psychonomicsociety.bsky.social

We are excited to share that another SCANN Lab member, Ece Yüksel, has successfully defended her dissertation! Congratulations on this milestone and thank you for your many contributions to SCANN Lab.

We are excited to share that Ashish Sahoo has successfully completed his dissertation defense. He has also been awarded with the UF Hipergator Early Career award and the Gerber BCN Psychology Research award for his outstanding work. We congratulate him on this significant achievement!

SCANN Lab attended the CRaNE Conference in Atlanta this May, where we presented some of our latest research! @crane-navsci.bsky.social navsci.gatech.edu

We are thrilled to share that SCANN Lab member @ashleykrause.bsky.social has published her work on place attachment influencing meaning in life! www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Sites of meaning-making: Places of attachment afford psychological meaning

Do the places we live offer a source of meaning? In five studies, we investigate whether the places people are attached to afford higher meaning. Spec…

sciencedirect.com

The SCANN Lab is officially extramurally funded at UTA! Dr. Weisberg and Dr. Hunter Ball, received a grant from the Alliance of Hispanic Serving Research Universities to study GPS-supported navigation and support leadership development through the ASCENDR Leadership Program.

We recently wrote on these ideas too! In a chapter published in the Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, we dive into how these differences emerge from navigation strategies and underlying cognitive systems: osf.io/9x6a3

Why do some people never get lost while others rely on GPS? A new review, written by @hugospiers.bsky.social and @emre-yavuz-21.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44... argues that navigation ability is shaped by both fixed factors (age, genetics) and modifiable ones (sleep, exercise, experience).

Determinants of individual navigation ability - Nature Reviews Psychology

There is substantial variation across people in navigation ability, which is shaped by multiple factors. In this Review, Yavuz and Spiers organize these factors into lifetime, lifestyle and personal a...

nature.com

Individuals with aphantasia have difficulty forming mental imagery, and with her future research, Zoe aims to develop more inclusive methods for teaching complex concepts to students.

Zoe Cronin, our first year PhD student at SCANN lab was recently interviewed by Dallas Morning News where she discusses a condition known as aphantasia and its relationship to spatial cognition. Read more on this here: www.msn.com/en-us/money/...

They emphasize the importance of open science, standardizing navigation assessment methods, and focusing more on real-world challenges in navigation, particularly those experienced by older adults.

A recent book on navigation, “Challenges in Navigation Research”, includes a final chapter that was co-authored by Dr. Weisberg. In that chapter, the authors propose a framework for future research in the field. link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

RSC was successful at decoding categories during the approach-avoidance task as well as at task decoding. These findings suggest that activity in these scene selective regions is not fixed and is influenced by behavioral goals.

Participants performed a categorization (classify scenes by type) and approach-avoidance task (decide whether or not to approach a scene). Results showed that OPA had the highest category decoding, OPA and PPA were successful at decoding categories during the categorization task

In their study, Koc et al. looked at how scene selective brain regions (PPA, OPA, RSC) change their activity depending on behavioral goals. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Task-modulated neural responses in scene-selective regions of the human brain

The study of scene perception is crucial to the understanding of how one interprets and interacts with their environment, and how the environment impa…

sciencedirect.com

They showed that contextual changes (such as adding novel wall, ceiling and floor colors and textures) led to greater overestimation of distance judgments, followed by global geometric changes, while local geometric changes had weaker effects.

In this recently published study, the researchers manipulated geometric and contextual cues in a virtual environment and observed their effects on participants’ distance judgments. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Dr. Weisberg explains how using AI to investigate the relationship between brain structure and navigational abilities suggests that there might not be any relation between the two as previously thought. Read more on this news article here: www.uta.edu/news/news-re...

UTA researcher uses AI to rethink navigation skills

UTA researcher finds no clear link between brain structure and navigation ability in young adults

uta.edu

Dr. Weisberg just went on his first professional podcast! Tune in to hear about how people navigate, why GPS can help OR hurt, and what aging teaches us about flexibility and strategy. Give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/0Z5o... And reach out! We'd love to hear what you think.

How Humans Find Their Way: The Cognitive Neuroscience of Navigation

open.spotify.com

In other words, memory seems to be biased toward a familiar or preferred way of seeing a scene or object, and then the brain expands or contracts the memory of what we have seen to match that preferred view.

They showed that this transition point was not related to how far away the viewer is, but rather to the view that people considered to “look best” (cont.)

As we move away from an object our view shifts along a continuum from object (when we are close) to scene (when we are far away). Park et al. examined this continuum. @taliakonkle.bsky.social jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx...

Their behavioral testing also confirmed that people generally rate concave shapes more as scenes compared to convex ones. This is consistent with the idea that scenes are perceived as something that we can act within (hence the concavity).

Using concave versus convex images of scenes and objects, this article found that PPA corresponds more strongly to concave scenes/objects compared to convex ones. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Concavity as a diagnostic feature of visual scenes

Despite over two decades of research on the neural mechanisms underlying human visual scene, or place, processing, it remains unknown what exactly a “…

sciencedirect.com

Although the discovery happened decades earlier, the ability to synchronize the animal’s location with neural firing using newly developed technology led to greater acceptance of place cells and the concept of a cognitive map (although controversial) in the scientific community.

Here, John O'keefe, the 2014 Nobel Prize winner, describes the process of discovering hippocampal place cells that led to his Nobel Prize. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

As the paper notes, the reason for this behavior in older rats (and in humans) is still unclear. Anatomically, this might be due to reliance on extra-hippocampus circuits rather than circus within the hippocampus which typically support allocentric strategies.

Using the Morris Watermaze, researchers found that younger rats converge on allocentric strategies earlier in the trials, while older rats continue switching between allocentric and egocentric strategies until the last trial. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

Older Rats Switch Between Distinctly Different Behavior Strategies to Solve the Spatial Version of the Morris Watermaze

It has been established that aged rats are worse at learning the spatial version of the Morris watermaze task compared to their younger counterparts. It remains unclear, however, whether this poorer ...

onlinelibrary.wiley.com

This shows how well a space is encoded correlates with better encoding of new information encountered in that space. Smaller spaces with more corners tend to be better remembered. These findings could inform environmental design, especially for those with impaired navigation.

In this recent study, the researchers looked at the usefulness of spaces as placeholders for memories. They assessed how well different spaces are encoded and how well an object within those spaces is remembered at a later time. www.nature.com/articles/s41...