Hippocampus and Spatial Navigation

Hippocampus and Spatial Navigation (Maguire et al., 2000)

  • Aim: Does the hippocampus play a role in spatial navigation?
  • Method: The independent variable was the group of people and how much they had been navigating - they compared London taxi drivers to a control group
  • The dependent variable was the hippocampus size
  • Results: They found that taxi drivers have a larger posterior hippocampus than the control group
  • The size of the posterior hippocampus positively correlated with how long the taxi drivers had been working as taxi drivers
  • Conclusion: This suggests that the posterior hippocampus has the localized function of spatial navigation
  • The longer you spend taxi driving the more it affects the posterior size of the hippocampus
  • This suggests that practicing navigation (a form of cognition) affects hippocampus size (physiology)
  • You can also use this study for the syllabus point of an interaction of cognition and physiology

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