Schedule of Events | Symposia

Sketchpad Series

Developing a virtual reality assessment to quantify navigational impairments in aging and early Alzheimer's disease

Poster Session E - Monday, March 31, 2025, 2:30 – 4:30 pm EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Annie R. Kim¹ (annieek@student.ubc.ca), Afsoon G. Mombeini¹, Isaac G. Morgan¹, Adam W. Lester¹, Inzaghi Moniaga¹, Talia C. Apel¹, Manu S. Madhav¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Spatial navigation impairments are among the earliest cognitive deficits observed in Alzheimer’s disease (AD), preceding symptoms such as memory loss. However, existing spatial navigation tests are often limited in ecological validity and fail to effectively distinguish between egocentric (self-referenced) and allocentric (environment-referenced) navigation. To address these limitations, we developed a novel virtual reality (VR) task designed to quantify age- and disease-related changes in navigation abilities and identify potential behavioural biomarkers for cognitive impairment. In this immersive VR task, participants must keep track of their starting position and two distant landmarks as they navigate along paths of increasing complexity in a naturalistic 3D environment. Navigation performance is assessed using pointing tasks, with three primary metrics: egocentric error, allocentric error, and allocentric consistency. Data collection is currently ongoing with cognitively healthy young and older adults to establish baseline measures during normative aging. In the next phase, we will recruit individuals with early AD to examine and compare navigational impairments in this population. We hypothesize that older adults will show increased allocentric deficits compared to young adults, with additional egocentric impairments in the AD population. The resulting behavioural data will be analyzed using traditional statistical analysis and machine learning techniques to estimate patterns indicative of AD-related cognitive impairment. Results from this project will be combined with future rodent studies to allow for cross-species comparisons that deepen our mechanistic understanding of AD-related navigation impairments. The ultimate goal is the development of a sensitive, navigation-based behavioural biomarker to facilitate early AD detection and monitoring.

Topic Area: OTHER