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Uh-oh, Where Did I Park the Car?

Remembering where your car is in the parking lot involves remembering what your car looks like and remembering the location in space where you left it. Memory for the location is called spatial memory. When trying to find a particular passage in a book they’ve read, readers will often have a strong sense of where on the page the passage is located even if they can’t remember exactly which page it was on. This is an example of spatial memory and it is fundamental to our daily lives because it allows us to build a mental representation of our environment and to orient ourselves with respect to other people and places.

Spatial memory operates on a broad range of time scales to serve a variety of important functions. On short time scales, working spatial memory plays an important role in representing the location of objects in a scene, and over longer time scales, spatial memory is essential for rooting oneself with respect to the environment and finding places. As we sit, stand, walk and reach, spatial working memory plays a fundamental role in guiding behaviors. Spatial memory deficits have been reported in individuals with a variety of clinical conditions, including developmental disorders, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease, temporal lobe epilepsy and victims of stroke.

Dr. Cynthia Moss studies spatial memory in bats in her Auditory Neuroethology Laboratory. Echolocating bats produce ultrasonic vocalizations and process information carried by returning echoes to build a three-dimensional model of the world using sound. The model is stored in memory and is one of the factors that allows the bat to navigate in its environment. Understanding how the bat builds a spatial representation of its environment and how that memory is stored and retrieved from the brain provides an important and valuable route to understanding how the same processes take place in people.