Spatial cognition and behavior in young and elderly adults: Implications for learning new environments.

Abstract

Young and elderly women's performances on scene-recognition, distance-ranking, route-execution, and map-placement tasks were compared in familiar and novel supermarkets to seek evidence of an age-related deficit in spatial cognitive performance, a benefit of environmental familiarity, and an age-related decrement in the efficiency of spatial learning. Results suggested that younger adults acquired spatial information in a novel environment more quickly than did elderly adults, but findings indicated neither an age-related deficit in spatial cognitive performance nor a benefit of environmental familiarity. Scores from psychometric tests produced low correlations with cognitive task performance. Of the behaviors observed during exploration and route execution, only 1 was significantly correlated with cognitive task performance. Standing without scanning was negatively correlated with performance on 3 tasks for elderly adults only.

Age differences in neural correlates of route encoding and route recognition

“…However, there was a small but significant difference in performance between groups. It is likely that this difference is attributable to subtle spatial memory deficits in our sample of older subjects, consistent with previous findings (Kirasic, 1991;Kirasic et al, 1992;Moffat and Resnick, 2002;Moffat et al, 2001;Wilkniss et al, 1997;for review, see Kirasic, 2001).…”

“…It is common that elderly individuals not only avoid unfamiliar routes and places due to self-perceived deficits in navigation (Burns, 1999), they also have measurable deficits in place and route learning as assessed in real and virtual reality environments (Kirasic, 1991;Kirasic et al, 1992;Moffat and Resnick, 2002;Moffat et al, 2001;Wilkniss et al, 1997). Moreover, navigational memory deficits are an important marker of early dementia and thus relevant for early diagnosis (Morris, 1993).…”

Neurocognitive aging: prior memories hinder new hippocampal encoding

“…Furthermore, aging is associated with an attenuated electrophysiological response to new items, and with impairments in determining whether items are new or have been seen previously [14]. Weakened processing of novelty might extend the training required for aged individuals to learn a novel environment [19].…”

How can we best use landmarks to support older people in navigation?

“…They also have greater difficulty maintaining extrapersonal orientation (i.e. spatial orientation with respect to external objects) (Aubrey and Dobbs 1989), and in making distance and direction judgements about novel environments (Kirasic 1991). Difficulties can also arise as sensory difficulties make it harder to perceive information from the surrounding environment.…”