Anxiety and Depressive Traits in the Healthy Population Does Not Affect Spatial Orientation and Navigation.

The ability to navigate and orient in spatial surroundings is critical for effective daily functioning. Such ability is perturbed in clinically diagnosed mood and anxiety disorders, with patients exhibiting poor navigational skills. Here, we investigated the effects of depression and anxiety traits (not the clinical manifestation of the disorders) on the healthy population and hypothesized that greater levels of depression and anxiety traits would manifest in poorer spatial orientation skills and, in particular, with a poor ability to form mental representations of the environment, i.

How Does Dementia Begin to Manifest in Bipolar Disorder? A Description of Prodromal Clinical and Cognitive Changes.

Background: Older adults with bipolar disorder (BD) have increased dementia risk, but signs of dementia are difficult to detect in the context of pre-existing deficits inherent to BD.

Objective: To identify the emergence of indicators of early dementia in BD.

Methods: One hundred and fifty-nine non-demented adults with BD from the National Alzheimer's Coordinating Center (NACC) data repository underwent annual neuropsychological assessment up to 14 years (54.

A Novel Training Program to Improve Human Spatial Orientation: Preliminary Findings.

The ability to form a mental representation of the surroundings is a critical skill for spatial navigation and orientation in humans. Such a mental representation is known as a "cognitive map" and is formed as individuals familiarize themselves with the surrounding, providing detailed information about salient environmental landmarks and their spatial relationships. Despite evidence of the malleability and potential for training spatial orientation skills in humans, it remains unknown if the specific ability to form cognitive maps can be improved by an appositely developed training program.