Path integration ability in humans: establishing a new diagnostic tool

Objectives: Navigation strategies require different complex abilities. Without landmarks, navigation is based on information about self-velocity, which is transformed to position or orientation by a process called path integration (PI). Using PI, one can estimate the own position without visual or acoustic clues by integrating small increments of movement onto a continually updated representation of direction and distance from a starting point. Respective deficits can derive from damages of cerebral areas involved in spatial navigation, particularly structures of the temporal lobe, most notably the hippocampus,…