Schedule of Events | Symposia

Symposium Session 11 - Harnessing virtual reality to study memory and spatial navigation across the lifespan

Symposium Session 11: Tuesday, April 1, 2025, 1:30 – 3:30 pm EDT, Constitution A

Chairs: Tammy Tran¹, Rolando Masís-Obando^2,3; ¹Stanford University, ²Johns Hopkins University, ³Princeton University
Presenters: Rolando Masís-Obando, Ken Norman, Christopher Baldassano, Birgit Peña Häufler, Tammy Tran, Edgar Gaviria, Søren Salomo, Bruce Walker, Manu Madhav, Annie Kim, Inzaghi Moniaga, Leticia Cid, Talia Apel, Afsoon Mombeini, Tammy Tran, Daniel Tadeo, Eliza Johnson, Lauren DaCorro, Jeremy Bailenson, Anthony Wagner, S.M.H Hosseini

In recent years, there is increasing popularity of the usage of immersive virtual reality to explore complex cognitive processes. The current symposium proposal demonstrates innovative applications of immersive virtual reality to investigate episodic and semantic memory, as well as spatial navigation across the lifespan and in Alzheimer’s disease. By creating immersive environments that simulate real-world experiences in combination with cutting-edge functional neuroimaging and eye-tracking tools, we can gain unique insights into how individuals of all ages interact with their spatial surroundings, encode, recall, and navigate through spatial environments and the subsequent impact of these immersive virtual environments on other processes such as semantic memory and creative inspiration. The first two talks explore how episodic and semantic memories develop in immersive virtual reality in healthy young adults, and the subsequent effect of these episodic memories as scaffolds for future experiences and the impact on other cognitive processes such as creativity. The last two talks investigate age-related and disease-related changes in egocentric and allocentric navigation and spatial memory across the lifespan in young adults, clinically unimpaired older adults, and patients with mild cognitive impairment, a transitional phase between healthy aging and Alzheimer’s disease dementia. By leveraging immersive virtual reality, we can more effectively examine the intricacies of real-world, naturalistic behaviors and investigate complex cognitive processes such as episodic memory and spatial navigation, as well as detect the subtle changes in these behaviors in aging and disease.

Presentations

How strong is your memory palace? Reliable room representations predict subsequent memory for placed objects

Rolando Masís-Obando^1,2, Ken Norman¹, Christopher Baldassano³; ¹Princeton University, ²Johns Hopkins University, ³Columbia University

It is still not well understood what psychological and neural factors make spatial contexts effective scaffolds for storing and accessing memories. We hypothesized that spatial context representations must be stable over time to provide a consistent cue for retrieval. To test this, we developed a novel paradigm that quantified the within-subject stability of a spatial context (“room reliability”), which could then be used to predict later memory for episodic information occurring at this spatial location. We constructed a virtual reality (VR) “memory palace” environment made up of 23 distinct rooms that participants explored using a head-mounted VR display. The day after learning the layout, participants underwent whole-brain fMRI while being presented with videos of the rooms in the memory palace, allowing us to measure the reliability of the neural activity pattern associated with each room. They were taken back to VR and asked to memorize the locations of 23 distinct objects randomly placed within each of the 23 rooms, and then returned to the scanner as they recalled the objects and the rooms in which they appeared. We found that our room reliability measure was predictive of object reinstatement across cortex, and further showed that this was driven not only by the group-level reliability of a room across participants but also the idiosyncratic reliability of rooms within each participant. Together, these results showcase how the quality of a spatial context memory can be quantified and used to ‘audit’ its utility as a memory scaffold for future experiences.

Inspiring Creativity through Memory in Immersive Virtual Reality

Birgit Peña Häufler^1,3, Tammy Tran², Edgar Gaviria¹, Søren Salomo¹, Bruce Walker³; ¹Technische Universität Berlin, ²Stanford University, ³Georgia Institute of Technology

Although the presence of visual stimuli has been reported to impact task performance, particularly in stimulating creativity, these mechanisms underlying this relationship are unknown. One proposed mechanism is through the activation of task-related schema. Prior research on the neurocognitive basis of creative idea generation has highlighted the relevance of semantic memory for this process. Here, we investigate how the visual work environment may relate to semantic memory. We use a word sentence construction task to estimate semantic memory network structures (i.e., flexible vs. steep), and investigate how they are impacted by the activation of work-related schema and their subsequent relationship to idea generation. Drawing on the potential of virtual reality (VR) as individual workspace, we first assess the associations of existing VR workspace applications to work-related schemas. Then we assess their impact on semantic memory network structures and finally, on idea generation, assessed through the alternative uses task. 100 young adults (18-28 yrs) first completed baseline semantic memory and idea generation trials, and repeated these tasks in immersive VR schema-specific workspaces. As predicted, we found significant relationships and differences between exposure to the respective VR workspaces and changes in SMN structure, and between SMN structure and AUT originality. These findings aid our understanding of the relationship between visual workspace representations and creativity and provide insights for effective workspace design.

Virtual reality assessment to quantify navigational impairments in aging and early Alzheimer's disease

Manu Madhav¹, Annie Kim¹, Inzaghi Moniaga¹, Leticia Cid¹, Talia Apel¹, Afsoon Mombeini¹; ¹University of British Columbia

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) typically begins its progression from the entorhinal cortex and hippocampus, regions crucial for spatial navigation and memory. Although cognitive tests assessing episodic memory are well established, identifying a non-invasive behavioural biomarker based on spatial navigation could allow for earlier detection of AD, leading to more timely interventions and improved quality of life. We are developing a novel virtual reality (VR)-based navigation task that scales in complexity to provide a consistent measure of navigational performance. In this task, younger and older participants must keep track of their starting position and the locations of two distant landmarks as they traverse a corridor in the virtual environment. The task evaluates both egocentric (self-referenced) and allocentric (environment-referenced) navigation across varying path complexities to quantify navigational impairments. Error metrics from the participants’ performance increase with the complexity of the path and allow us to quantify differences between younger and older participants. Full behavioral data, including head orientation, virtual movement and joystick actions are used to train a machine learning model, that can also distinguish between younger and older participants. We seek to extend this study to recruit participants with diagnosed early AD, to detect their navigational impairments relative to healthy older participants, with the hypothesis that they will be further impaired in egocentric metrics. Our long-term goal is to develop a portable and sensitive behavioural biomarker that quantifies navigational ability. Designed for use by both clinicians and caregivers, this tool will facilitate early AD detection, enable long-term monitoring, and guide restorative interventions.

Investigating age-related and disease-related differences in object location memory using immersive virtual reality.

Tammy Tran¹, Daniel Tadeo², Eliza Johnson^2,3, Lauren DaCorro², Jeremy Bailenson¹, Anthony Wagner¹, S.M.H Hosseini²; ¹Stanford University, ²Stanford School of Medicine, ³Palo Alto University

Misplacing objects is a commonly reported clinical symptom that scales with disease severity in Alzheimer’s disease, suggesting a potential role of object misplacement as an early indicator of Alzheimer’s disease clinical symptoms. Approaches to tracking object misplacement typically involve questionnaire-based approaches or spatial working memory tasks, which fail to encompass the complexity of naturalistic behaviors. In the current study, we used immersive virtual reality to investigate (1) egocentric and allocentric object location memory and (2) spatial precision of their episodic memories in young adults, clinically unimpaired older adults and patients with Alzheimer’s disease. Participants were asked to learn and recall the location of different objects within a living room. In the egocentric version of the task, individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) exhibited the lowest performance, followed by clinically unimpaired older adults, with young adults performing the highest for overall location memory. In the allocentric version of the task, both clinically unimpaired older adults and patients with MCI are impaired on the task compared to young adults. CA1 volume predicts performance on both the egocentric and allocentric version of the task, while differences in eye-tracking fixations during encoding predict subsequent retrieval performance. Together, these findings indicate that examining real-world behaviors in an immersive virtual reality can reveal clear age and disease-related differences in memory performance. Ongoing work links these cognitive changes to plasma biofluid biomarkers of Aβ42:40 and pTau181 to examine the potential of immersive virtual reality in tracking age-related and clinical symptoms of memory decline.