Séminaire Stephen RAMANOEL

Aging is associated with a complex array of structural and functional changes, that gradually affect motor, sensory, and cognitive processes. These multiscale changes can hinder older adults’ interaction with their environment, progressively reducing their autonomy in performing tasks relevant to everyday life. In this context, spatial navigation paradigms offer a representative case of intricate high-level functions that involve dynamic interactions of multi-sensory perceptual, cognitive, and motor processes. Older adults exhibit prominent impairments in their capacity to navigate efficiently, reorient themselves in unfamiliar environments or update their path when faced with obstacles. This decline in navigational capabilities has traditionally been ascribed to dysexecutive functions and memory deficits. In contrast, the contributions of age-related visual decline and motor impairments to spatial performances are usually overlooked. Yet, the ability to perceive visuo-spatial information, such as salient landmarks, or motor capacity to move toward a destination are crucial for efficient goal-behavior. Additionally, until now, the neural correlates of spatial cognition have mostly been studied in static conditions thereby disregarding perceptual (other than visual) and motor aspects of natural navigation. To address this gap, we implemented a highly interdisciplinary approach, bringing together clinical, psychophysical and behavioral assessments as well as neuroimaging paradigm involving freely moving behavior (mobile EEG), and virtual reality. In this seminar, I will present and discuss experimental results from both young and healthy older participants using an integrative approach that ranges from passive perception of visual scenes to active navigation tasks. This work helps to provide new insights into the behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying age-related spatial abilities deficits under more ecologically valid experimental settings.