The Gallery of Memories (GA-ME): A Novel Virtual Navigation Tool for the Study of Spatial Memory

For the vast majority of spatial navigation research, experimental tasks are implemented in real-world environments. In recent decades, there has been an increasing trend toward virtual environments, which offer several benefits compared to their real-world counterparts while also having certain limitations. With these properties in mind, we have developed the Gallery of Memories (GA-ME), a customizable virtual-navigation task that is equipped for the assessment of both spatial navigation and memory within a highly controlled three-dimensional environment. The GA-ME provides a 3D position and head direction (pitch and yaw) sampling rate that is significantly higher compared to alternatives, enabling users to reconstruct a participant’s movement in the environment with remarkable spatiotemporal precision while its design, including nested spaces, makes it optimal for the study of place and grid cells in humans. These properties imbue the GA-ME with the potential to be widely utilized in both research and clinical settings for the in-depth study of spatial navigation and memory, with the possibility of conducting human intra- and extra-cranial electrophysiology, imaging, and eye-tracking measurements relevant to these faculties.