Abstract
Spatial navigation is a process of determining and maintaining a course or trajectory from one place to another. There is a mild progressive decine of spatial navigation in the course of physiological ageing.
Nevertheless, severe spatial navigation deficit might be the first sign of incipient Alzheimer's disease at the stage of mild cognitive impairment, before the full dementia syndrome develops. Patients with mild cognitive impairment with memory deficit of hippocampal type, manifested by encoding and retrieval impairment, are at very high risk of Alzheimer's disease.
These patients have the same pattern of spatial navigation impairment as patients with mild Alzheimer's disease. Spatial navigation testing in older patients and a development of computerized tests for routine clinical use thus represent a possibility to further investigate this cognitive domain as well as an opportunity of an early diagnosis of Alzheimer's disease.
Spatial navigation in humans is of great significance for translational research as spatial navigation tests form a major part of basic cognitive research and are also used in preclinical testing of cognitive drugs in laboratory animals.