Ability To Navigate May Be Linked To Genes
 Imagine that you are emerging from the subway and heading for your destination when you realize that you are going in the wrong direction.
For a moment, you feel disoriented, but a scan of landmarks and the layout of the surrounding streets quickly helps you pinpoint your location, and you make it to your appointment with time to spare.
Research tells us that human adults, toddlers, rats, chicks and even fish routinely and automatically accomplish this kind of "reorientation" by mentally visualizing the geometry of their surroundings and figuring out where they are in space. Until now, however, we haven't understood that genes may play a part in that ability.
Writing this week in the online Early Edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a team led by Barbara Landau, the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at The Johns Hopkins University, for the first time links genes to our ability to navigate the world.
"We found that people with a rare genetic disorder cannot use one of the very basic systems of navigation that is present in humans as early as 18 months and shared across a wide range of species," Landau said. "To our knowledge, this is the first evidence from human studies of a link between the missing genes and the system that we use to reorient ourselves in space."
Working with lead author Laura Lakusta of Montclair State University in New Jersey and co-author Banchiamlack Dessalegn, a postdoctoral fellow at University of Chicago (both of whom recently received their Ph.D.s at Johns Hopkins under Landau's direction and carried out the research there), Landau's study involved people with a rare genetic disorder known as Williams syndrome.
Named for its discoverer, New Zealander Dr. J. C. P. Williams, the syndrome is caused when a small amount of genetic material is missing from one human chromosome. People with Williams syndrome are extremely social and verbally adept, but have difficulty with tasks such as assembling simple puzzles, copying basic patterns and navigating their bodies through the physical world. Williams syndrome occurs in one in 7,500 live births.
Source: Johns Hopkins University
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