Proposal F18 Faculty Ozubko

Sponsored Research Newsletter Fall 2018

Faculty Focus - Jason Ozubko, Psychology, NIH AREA Grant Recipient

Assistant Professor Jason Ozubko has been awarded a National Institutes of Health (NIH) Academic Research Enhancement Award (AREA) grant to conduct, with undergraduate students, a three-year investigation into the neural and cognitive bases of how people learn to navigate in unfamiliar territory. “The ultimate goal of the project is to decode the ways people build mental maps of their environments and to examine whether the ways people form these maps can be influenced by outside pressures. If the formation of mental maps can be influenced during development, it could eventually lead to interventions or training techniques to help people with navigational difficulties, such as the elderly.”
Dr. Ozubko was inspired by animal research that found that hippocampal place-cells, which track an animal’s position in space while it navigates, replay during periods of quiet wakefulness after a novel environment is experienced. This suggests that animals may be mentally exploring previously traveled spaces, or at least neurally organizing spatial representations according to spatial layout. Dr. Ozubko hypothesizes that in humans cognitive maps can be influenced by having participants selectively reminisce about certain aspects of recent navigation experiences.
Dr. Ozubko created his own software utilizing Google Street View to enable research participants to rapidly and easily learn virtual real-world environments by navigating through them. He will use memory retrieval tasks to affect the kinds of cognitive maps that the participants form and measure indicators of: how confident participants are in their navigation (speed of travel and number of pauses during travel); how much they are planning or re-planning their routes as they travel (decision time at intersections); how efficiently they are using their cognitive maps (directness of travel towards goal); and the degree to which they’ve integrated spatial memories into a cognitive map (number of novel streets taken). A planned extension of the project will perform functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at the University of Rochester Center for Brain Imaging (RCBI), which will examine the neural representations of space that participants develop.
“My students and I think the combination of virtual navigation using Google Street View with brain imaging could help answer some long standing questions in the field, and my students are looking forward to getting involved in each step of the project.”