Traumatic brain injury (TBI) damages many regions of the brain but damage to the hippocampus has been particularly linked to functional deficits in memory and wayfinding (i.e., finding one's way in familiar and unfamiliar environments). The current study investigated the nature of these wayfinding problems using a virtual simulation of a Morris water maze, a standard test of hippocampal function in laboratory animals. Eleven TBI survivors and 12 comparison participants, matched for gender, age and education were tested to see if they could find a location in a virtual room marked by a) a visible platform, b) a single object, c) one object of 8 different ones, or d) distal room cues (which requires cognitive mapping). TBI survivors were impaired at finding the location based on room cues but not when the other cues were present. These results indicate that TBI impairs cognitive mapping but not associative processes in wayfinding.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uvic.ca/oai:dspace.library.uvic.ca:1828/2186 |
| Date | 11 February 2010 |
| Creators | Livingstone, Sharon Ann |
| Contributors | Skelton, Ronald William |
| Source Sets | University of Victoria |
| Language | English, English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Rights | Available to the World Wide Web |
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