Researchers are closer to knowing why it happens.
A new study suggests that the brain differentiates very similar environments — such as two stores from the same supermarket chain — as if they were even more different than two places that are nothing alike.
The following content via University of Arizona
Imagine you’re walking through a chain supermarket, headed for the dairy section.
You’ve done it a million times: Take a right at the entrance, away from the produce, and walk past two-dozen aisles of canned soups, boxed macaroni and other staples. The rows of industrial refrigerators should be right … about … here.
But they’re not.
And then you remember: You’re at the supermarket across town, not the one in your neighborhood. Everything else looks the same, but the dairy section’s location is flipped, and you’re at the wrong end of the store.
Researchers have long struggled to learn how the brain remembers spatial environments, especially those that are similar — such as two stores from the same supermarket chain — and how the brain avoids confusion, or doesn’t.
A new study by University of Arizona psychologists suggests that the brain may treat similar environments as if they are even more different than a pair of environments that have nothing in common. The concept is known to brain scientists as “repulsion.”
“Until our study, we didn’t know how the brain might be able to differentiate those things,” said senior study author Arne Ekstrom, a professor of psychology in the College of Science who leads UArizona’s Human Spatial Cognition Laboratory.
Li Zheng, a postdoctoral fellow in Ekstrom’s lab, led the study, which was published in the journal Nature Communications.
The findings could eventually help scientists better understand why conditions such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease cause symptoms such as disorientation and poor spatial memory.
