Understanding and assisting difficulties with everyday spatial navigation

空间导航是我们日常生活的基本组成部分，从追溯熟悉的旅程到探索我们第一次访问的城市。有效的导航需要心理能力的复杂综合，包括我们对环境的感知，将我们的注意力引导到有用的部分，以及我们记住这些特征以备将来旅行的能力。由于这种复杂性，人们在导航时遇到困难也就不足为奇了，这会对生活质量、心理健康和就业能力造成巨大影响。虽然许多人在生活中的某个时刻遇到困难，例如老年或接受化疗，但其他人则会经历终身障碍，他们的需求很少得到认可或满足。在这个项目中，我们将提供一个全面的了解，在导航能力的个体差异，在典型的成年人和弱势群体。我们还将测试新的方法来帮助那些在日常寻路方面遇到困难的人。我们将首先招募一个有代表性的脑积水成年人样本，脑积水是一种与大脑中液体过多有关的常见疾病。据传闻，这种情况对航行能力有很大的影响，反过来又对人们及其护理人员的日常生活产生不利影响。然而，科学家们还没有对这个问题做出全面的解释，也没有描述出负责的潜在认知能力。参与者将完成一系列旨在评估广泛导航能力的实验任务。重要的是，测试将在实验室和真实的世界中进行。这些任务的表现将与基本认知能力相关，这将使我们能够了解这一群体的各种优势和劣势，沿着支撑这些优势和劣势的基本认知技能。日常导航的困难并不局限于弱势群体-在典型人群中存在很大的个体差异。科学文献目前缺乏对导航能力规范性个体差异的全面和当代研究，这可以为理解和帮助不同人群的困难铺平道路。典型成人的大型代表性样本（N=200）将完成与脑积水个体相同的任务。这将提供优势和劣势的完整描述，同时更好地了解它们背后的技能。最后，我们将开发和测试新的认知方法，以帮助遇到困难的人。目前还不存在这样的方法，虽然人们正在努力开发基于全球定位系统导航的导航辅助设备，但心理学研究表明，这种方法实际上会损害用户的导航性能。我们将邀请来自前两个阶段的人，他们在我们的任务中遇到了最大的困难，他们将参加一项比较两种不同方法的研究。这些策略将与一般的正念策略进行比较，我们将在一周后评估哪些策略对路线学习的积极影响最大。我们稍后将随访参与者的日常导航体验以及他们的生活质量，以评估干预的长期益处。沿着他们的生活质量。总之，这项工作将为我们理解典型成年人和相当大的弱势群体的基本日常行为提供重要的一步变化。它还将率先采取循证康复方法，改善遇到航行困难的个人的日常体验。这将为今后的干预方案铺平道路，该方案将适用于生活受到寻路问题影响的各种群体。

Spatial navigation is a fundamental component of our daily lives, from retracing a familiar journey to work through to exploring a city that we are visiting for the first time. Effective navigation requires a complex synthesis of psychological abilities, including our perception of the environment, directing our attention to useful parts of it, and our ability to remember those features for future journeys. Because of this complexity, it is no surprise that people can experience difficulty with navigation, and this can take a great toll on quality of life, psychological well-being, and employability. Whilst many people experience difficulty at some point in their lives, such as old age or when receiving chemotherapy, other people experience lifelong impairments, and their needs are rarely recognised or met. In this project we will provide a full understanding of individual differences in navigational ability, in both typical adults and a vulnerable population. We will also test new methods to assist people experiencing difficulties with daily wayfinding.We will first recruit a representative sample of adults with Hydrocephalus, a common condition associated with an excess of fluid in the brain. This condition is anecdotally known to have a very large impact on navigational ability which, in turn, adversely affects the daily lives of people and their carers. However, scientists have not produced a full account of this issue, nor have they characterised the underlying cognitive abilities responsible. Participants will complete a battery of experimental tasks designed to assess a broad range of navigational abilities. Importantly, the tests will take place both in the laboratory and the real world. Performance across these tasks will be related to basic cognitive abilities, which will enable us to understand both the variety of strengths and weakness present in this group, along with the basic cognitive skills that underlie them.Difficulties with everyday navigation are not confined to vulnerable groups - there are great individual differences within the typical population. The scientific literature currently lacks a comprehensive and contemporary study of normative individual differences in navigational abilities, which can pave the way to understanding and assisting difficulties across populations. A large representative sample of typical adults (N=200) will complete the same battery of tasks as the individuals with hydrocephalus. This will provide a full characterisation of strengths and weaknesses, alongside a greater understanding of the skills that underlie them. Finally, we will develop and test new cognitive methods to assist people experiencing difficulty. No such methods currently exist, and while much effort is being devoted to the development of navigational aids based on GPS guidance, psychological research has demonstrated that this method can actually impair navigational performance in users. We will invite people from both of the preceding stages who had the most difficulty on our tasks, and they will take part in a study that compares two different methods. These strategies will be compared to a general mindfulness strategy, and we will assess which have the most positive effect on route-learning a week later. We will later follow-up participants' daily navigational experiences, along with their quality of life, to assess the longer-term benefits of intervention. Together, this work will provide an important step-change in our understanding of a fundamental daily behaviour, in both typical adults and a sizeable vulnerable population. It will also spearhead an evidence-based approach to rehabilitation that can improve the daily experiences of individuals experiencing navigational difficulties. This will pave the way to a future programme of interventions that will be applicable to a broad variety of groups whose lives are affected by wayfinding problems.