Marked individual differences in the ability to mentally map our environment are pronounced not only among people of different ages or clinical conditions, but also within healthy young adults. Previous studies have shown that hippocampus size positively correlated with spatial navigation ability in healthy young adults, navigation experts, and patients with hippocampus lesions. However, a recent pre-registered study (Weisberg, Newcombe, & Chatterjee, 2019) with a large sample size (n = 90) did not observe this correlation in healthy young adults. Motivated by evidence that self-report sense of direction (SOD) could have a profound impact on how individuals utilize environmental cues, and that different navigation strategies could have opposite impacts on wayfinding performance in individuals with different cognitive map formation (CMF) abilities, we reanalyzed the publicly available dataset from Weisberg et al.'s study. We tested the influence of participants' SOD and CMF abilities on hippocampal volume-performance relationships. We find evidence that the non-significant correlation could envelop heterogeneous correlations among subgroups of individuals: the correlation between the right posterior hippocampal volume and spatial learning performance is significantly higher among individuals with high spatial ability than individuals with low spatial ability. This pattern of performance was observed for both SOD and CMF moderations of the relationship between hippocampal volume and spatial learning. While our re-analyses are fundamentally exploratory in nature, the new results imply that the relationship between hippocampal volume and spatial learning performance might be more complicated than previously thought.

中文翻译：

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健康年轻人中海马体体积与认知图准确性之间的异质相关性。

不仅在不同年龄或临床状况的人群中，而且在健康的年轻人中，在心理环境图谱绘制能力上存在明显的个体差异。先前的研究表明，在健康的年轻人，导航专家和海马病变患者中，海马大小与空间导航能力呈正相关。但是，最近的一项预先注册的研究（Weisberg，Newcombe和Chatterjee，2019年）的样本量较大（n = 90），并未在健康的年轻人中观察到这种相关性。有证据表明，自我报告的方向感（SOD）可能会对个人如何利用环境提示产生深远的影响，并且不同的导航策略可能会对具有不同认知图形成（CMF）能力的个人的寻路性能产生相反的影响，我们重新分析了Weisberg等人研究的公开可用数据集。我们测试了参与者的SOD和CMF能力对海马体量表现关系的影响。我们发现证据表明，不显着的相关性可以包容个体亚组之间的异类相关性：具有高空间能力的个体中，右后海马体积与空间学习性能之间的相关性明显高于具有低空间能力的个体。对于海马体积和空间学习之间关系的SOD和CMF调节，都观察到了这种表现模式。