Virtual navigation in healthy aging: Activation during learning and deactivation during retrieval predicts successful memory for spatial locations

Spatial navigation and spatial memory are two important skills for independent living, and are known to be compromised with age. Here, we investigate the neural correlates of successful spatial memory in healthy older adults in order to learn more about the neural underpinnings of maintenance of navigation skill into old age. Healthy older adults watched a video shot by a person navigating a route and were asked to remember objects along the route and then attempted to remember object locations by virtually pointing to the location of hidden objects from several locations along the route. Brain activity during watching and pointing was recorded with functional MRI. Larger activations in temporal and frontal regions during watching, and larger deactivations in superior parietal cortex and intraparietal sulcus during pointing, were associated with smaller location errors. These findings suggest that larger evoked responses during learning of spatial information coupled with larger deactivation of canonical spatial memory regions at retrieval are important for effective spatial memory in late life.