Yingying Yang
Montclair State University, NJ·Psychology
Finding one's way around, called spatial navigation or wayfinding, is an everyday skill. It develops through childhood and can decline with age-related disease.
- Fields
Psychology
Neuroscience
- Topics
spatial navigation
wayfinding
Down syndrome
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Jul 2029
What they work on
- Determine whether spatial navigation tasks such as the Hidden Goal Task separate adults with Down syndrome showing early Alzheimer's-like decline from those aging normally, comparing egocentric, allocentric and switching tasks.
- Test whether navigation performance predicts cognitive decline in Down syndrome beyond executive function, and compare lab scores with caregiver-reported everyday navigation.
- Test whether children's wayfinding skills develop in sequential stages or in parallel, and whether virtual-reality tasks capture real-world wayfinding in children aged 6–10.
- Examine how verbal and spatial abilities, gender and other social and demographic factors shape the development of wayfinding in children.
More about the research
The lab studies wayfinding at both ends of life. One project tracks how children build this skill. The other asks whether navigation problems can serve as an early warning sign of Alzheimer's disease in adults with Down syndrome.
Why it matters
Adults with Down syndrome face high Alzheimer's risk, and subtle early decline is often missed. Navigation tests that detect it sooner could refine screening and allow timely changes to daily support. They may also inform the study of other high-risk groups. A fuller picture of how children of different genders and backgrounds learn to find their way could inform how this everyday life skill is understood and supported.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Amy Needham
Vanderbilt University, TN·Psychology
Test whether drumming lessons improve inhibitory control — the ability to hold back an impulse — in 7- to 12-year-old children with Down syndrome, comparing an immediate-lesson group with a wait-list control group across two lab visits.
Elizabeth Cashdan
University of Utah, UT·Psychology
Measure how much children explore their surroundings without adult supervision, and in which environments, using phone GPS tracking combined with a vegetation index that rates how green each location is.
Ece Demir-Lira
University of Iowa, IA·Psychology
Test a serial mediation model in which gestational age at birth affects children's number skills through their verbal skills and then through the brain systems for numbers, measured with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS).
The school
Montclair State University: 2 labs on PI Pages, $44M a year on research, 39 research doctorates a year.
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