A recent study published in PLOS One reports that approximately 3% of individuals are affected by Developmental Topographical Disorientation, with this population’s sense of direction relating to town knowledge, adopted navigational strategies, and gender.
Numerous cognitive processes are involved in navigation, “the ability to move from one location to the next, following habitual routes and avoiding getting lost in new and familiar environments.” These include processes such as memory, mental imagery, and attention to environmental features, among others. As well, there are various internal factors relevant to navigation, such as gender, presence of psychiatric conditions, or neurological diseases.
In this work, Laura Piccardi and colleagues focused on Sense of Direction – one’s own perception of their navigation abilities – in relation to demographic factors (e.g., age, gender), familiarity with environment, navigational strategies, means of travelling (i.e., active or passive), and right-left confusion.
“Most importantly for the purpose of the present study, navigational difficulties can be associated to a neurodevelopmental disorder that specifically undermines navigational skills,” write the authors. This phenomenon is known as Developmental Topographical Disorientation (DTD).
Interestingly, individuals with DTD have an intact memory and neuropsychological profile but show significant deficits in spatial cognition and daily navigation, as well as a disproportionate impairment in coordinate (vs. categorical) spatial encoding. Thus, these individuals often stop at landmark knowledge, without developing route knowledge of the environment, suggesting incapacity for allocentric representation (i.e., location of object in relation to other objects). Further, prior research has demonstrated that individuals with DTD show no activation in the navigation brain network, despite normal activation of prefrontal areas that are involved with everyday actions.
“The objective of the present study was: to estimate the percentage of the DTD among a convenience sample of Italian adults aged 18–35 years to define soon clinical lines of intervention and a protocol of investigation shared on the national network,” write the researchers.
Participants were recruited from Italian regions between 2016-2019. A total of 1,698 individuals (635 males) without neurological disorders, who were between ages 18-35, and on average had 14.8 years of full-time education, participated in this research. They filled out an anamnesis questionnaire, indicating problems with spatial orientation in childhood, history of neurological or psychiatric illness, learning disability, or alcohol and drug abuse, among other problems in their medical history.
Participants also filled out measures assessing familiarity and spatial cognitive style; these included subscales such as sense of direction (e.g., How is your ability to read a map?) and right-left confusion (e.g., In everyday life, do you confound right and left?).
Participants were classified as having DTD if they scored two standard deviations below the mean for “sense of direction.” Four other diagnostic criteria were considered, including getting lost 1-5 times per week in one’s most familiar environments, presence of problems with spatial orientation from an early age, no other cognitive difficulties impacting daily life, no known neurological issues with the exception of migraines, absence of psychiatric disorders, psychotropic drug use and substance abuse.
Approximately 3% of participants qualified the criteria for DTD. Gender, more so than education, was predictive of sense of direction. And women, more so than men, reported using landmark based navigational strategies and experienced difficulties with sense of direction. And although on average men tend to have better visuospatial and navigational skills, they are at an increased risk of DTD. Further, town knowledge was negatively associated with DTD, which suggests it can serve as a protective factor in counteracting its onset.
The use of survey strategies, an advanced navigation strategy referring to “map-like representation in an allocentric perspective” was not associated with the presence of DTD. Further, individuals with high spatial skills did not report right-left confusion, which is typically involved in navigational disorders.
With regard to study limitations, the researchers note, “the study was conducted using an online self-reported survey. In the future it will be important to investigate DTD in presence using a battery of navigational tests.”
The study, “‘Where am I?’ A snapshot of the developmental topographical disorientation among young Italian adults”, was authored by Laura Piccardi, Massimiliano Palmiero, Vincenza Cofini, Paola Verde, Maddalena Boccia, Liana Palermo, Cecilia Guariglia, and Raffaella Nori.
