2022 Silmo Academy Award winner A/Prof Denis Sheynikhovich

Associate Professor Denis Sheynikhovich of France’s Institut de la Vision, Sorbonne University, has won the 2022 Silmo Academy Award for his project, ‘Impact of visual ageing on mobility in a real environment’.

His win follows lab-mate Dr Angelo Arleo’s 2020 Silmo Academy win for his work on StreetLab, a simulated street in which researchers attempt to unravel how ageing – particularly age-related vision deterioration – affects navigation of the built environment*. In contrast, A/Prof Sheynikhovich’s study took him and his subjects outside the lab into a busy Paris railway station. “A real-world environment presents several technical difficulties but also gives us more information about how people behave in more realistic navigation scenarios,” he said.

It’s not just a case of gathering up a busload of senior citizens for a field trip, however, said A/Prof Sheynikhovich. “In France it is very difficult to obtain permission to do experiments with patients outside hospital. Therefore, in this particular project we targeted healthy ageing (subjects) to try to understand how advanced age affects our navigation capabilities, without addressing any specific visual pathology.” If the experimental protocol is validated and the research team obtain interesting results, they will try to extend the study to visually impaired patients, he said.

Although the project only recently began, A/Prof Sheynikhovich said his lab’s previous studies demonstrated a tendency for older people to look downwards and use the overall spatial layout of a space to orientate themselves, rather than landmarks. “This is different from younger people, who visually explore the surrounding environment to a much larger extent and can efficiently use both the geometric layout information and surrounding landmarks. We therefore expect that aged navigators will have difficulty in understanding how the unfamiliar train-station space is organised, in particular because it’s large and its geometry is quite complex.”

In gathering data about older people’s eye and head movements, posture and even brain activity as they navigate new spaces, A/Prof Sheynikhovich said he hopes to extract some patterns in navigation strategies. “In other words, we will test whether dynamics of eye movement is a behavioural marker of deficits in navigational ability.”