Spatial orientation and memory are key functions that help us to operate in a complex world. A European research consortium will retrace the evolutionary history of these cognitive skills and show how individuals adapt their navigational strategies to circumstance. A more in-depth understanding of how humans make sense of space will provide invaluable information for environmental planning and design, and lead to improved solutions for people with impaired spatial abilities.
 Finding your way home, remembering where you left the car keys or directing someone to the nearest hospital are examples of highly complex cognitive tasks based on spatial memory and orientation. Without these functions, navigating through daily life would be impossible. Our ability to construct spatial representations of the outside world, and to store them in our memory is likely to underlie many other higher cognitive functions in humans, such as decision-making and planning. Many other animals possess the ability to navigate around their environment but there are certain higher-order features of the human system, such as the ability to communicate spatial information verbally, which are uniquely human. The Wayfinding project will contribute to the NEST PATHFINDER initiative to investigate what it means to be human, by exploring the particularities of the cognitive organisation of spatial memory and orientation in humans from an evolutionary perspective. This European consortium, bringing together six laboratories working in psychology, physiology, biology, neuroscience, anthropology and artificial intelligence, aims to map differences in spatial ability both between humans and other species, and within human populations. |
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