Neuroplasticity

The brain’s ability to change structurally or functionally in response to experience.

Through developing new neueral pathways
Neural pathways created from repeated sensory stimulus
and through synaptic pruning: the brain's process of eliminating unused or weak synaptic connections, increasing neural efficiency under the "use it or lose it" principle.

A brain structure associated with:
memory
spatial memory
navigation

Memory for the layout of environments and where things are located.

Maguire et al 2000

To investigate the effect of spatial navigation on size of hippocampus

Quasi correlational experiment
single blind (the researcher analyzing scans did not know whether they belonged to a taxi driver or a control).
Participants: 16 right-handed male London taxi drivers and 50 right handed male non-taxi drivers (control group)
Methods:
Taxi Drivers had completed the "Knowledge" test and held their licenses for at least 1.5 years.
placed in MRI and compared
Voxel-Based Morphometry (VBM) measured the density of grey matter in the brain.
Pixel Counting calculated the hippocampal area in MRI images.

Taxi drivers had larger posterior hippocampi and smaller anterior hippocampi compared to controls.
Correlation: The size of the posterior hippocampus increased with the number of years driving a taxi
This suggests that the hippocampus adapts to environment
posterior hippocampus involved in using previously learned spatial information
the anterior hippocampus linked to learning new spatial layouts.

demonstrates structual neurplacisity: the brain's ability to physically change its structure in response to environmental demands, learning, and experience