Published October 04, 2018 by Tom Porter

A Sense of Direction: Neuroscience Project Analyzes Spatial Memory

How do we navigate our way from A to B to C and beyond? Why are some people better than others at doing it? What brain activity occurs when we are trying to remember how to get to a particular destination?

These are all questions that neuroscience professor Erika Nyhus and student researcher Caroline Rice ’19 are keen to address.

Under Nyhus’s supervision, Rice spent the summer in the Bowdoin neuroscience lab as a Kufe Summer Research Fellow reviewing and analyzing two years of data relating to spatial memory, decision-making, and learning. Rice is continuing the work as a senior, pursuing an honors thesis she plans to complete by the end of the spring semester.