New paper! Theta oscillations support active exploration in human spatial navigation

My co-authors Elizabeth Chrastil, Caroline Rice, Mathias Goncalves, Kylie Moore, Chantal Stern, and Erika Nyhus just published our paper Theta oscillations support active exploration in human spatial navigation in NeuroImage.

You might have experienced that finding your way across a new city is faster when you are actively exploring it, making decisions along the way, as compared to when you are just passively walking around following the instructions of others (or Google maps 😛). In this paper participants either actively or passively explored a virtual environment while their brain activity was recorded (using electroencephalography (EEG)). This brain activity shows specific rhythmical patterns (neural oscillations) and rhythms in the theta (4-8 Hz) frequency range are especially important for learning and navigation. As expected, the participants that actively explored were better at learning the layout of the environment than the passive explorers. In addition, this active exploration went hand in hand with an increase in theta oscillations, indicative of integration of new information into memory.

If you want to learn more about this, click here for the paper.