Maguire Et al.

Aim:  Do the hippomcampi of licensed taxi drivers have a greater volume than those non-taxi drivers

Participants:

• 16 Male Licensed cab drivers who had passed "The knowledge"
• Mean age of 44
• All licencesed for at least 18 months
• all right handed
• all described as having healthy medical neurological and psychiatric profiles

Control:

• 50 healthy right handed males
• selected from MRI scan database where taxi drivers were screened

Method:

Quasi Experiment, IV - Taxi Driver or not.  Data was collected from analysing MRI scans using VBM and pixel counting.

Results:

VBM: Taxi drivers had increased grey matter volume in the right and left posterior hippocampus

Pixel counting: showed no significant difference in overalll volume of hippocampi

Correlational analysis found that there was a postive correlation between the lenght of time spent as a taxi driver and the volume of the right posterior hippocampus

Conclusions:

Hippocampus shows plasticity, Volume increases with navigational experience

Right hippocamups holds mental maps.