BU Research Blog

Dr Jan Wiener, Dr Ramona Grzeschik and Mary O’Malley represented Bournemouth University Dementia Institute (BUDI) at the 1^st Interdisciplinary Navigation Symposium (iNav) in Bad Gastein from 26-30^th June 2016.  The iNav is a meeting that aims to bring together a diverse group of scientists from backgrounds such as (cognitive) neuroscience, animal behaviour and ethology, theoretical neurobiology and robotics to shed some light into the neural systems involved in spatial cognition and navigation.

Mary presented a poster showcasing her PhD research with the topic “How do we get there? The effects of cognitive ageing on map reading abilities.” – a study using ‘you-are-here maps’ and a virtual care environment to investigate orientation experiences of older people with memory difficulties.

Ramona presented a poster with preliminary results of her study on “Effects of Aging on Landmark Recognition” that investigates what features of landmarks are helpful for older people to memorize a route. Jan gave a talk about “The effects of typical and atypical ageing on orientation and navigation behaviour” where he presented two studies about the effects of ageing on different route learning strategies.

Jan additionally co-hosted a discussion on how compatible virtual reality navigation is with real-life navigation