Spatial reorientation decline in aging: the combination of geometry and landmarks

Caffò, Alessandro O.; Lopez, Antonella; Spano, Giuseppina; Serino, Silvia; Cipresso, Pietro; Stasolla, Fabrizio; Savino, Michelina; Lancioni, Giulio E.; Riva, Giuseppe; Bosco, Andrea

doi:10.1080/13607863.2017.1354973

Cited by 26 publications

(21 citation statements)

References 80 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Some scholars (Ishikawa & Montello, 2006; Thorndyke & Hayes-Roth, 1982; Wolbers & Hegarty, 2010) have already stated that learning from navigation requires a perspective change, translating procedural knowledge into survey knowledge and thus the chance of making mistakes in such spatial tasks is greater. Nonetheless, these findings contribute to support for the notion that familiarity with the environment protects elderly people from the effects of allocentric spatial memory decline, more likely due to the general difficulty of acquiring new information (Caffò et al, 2018; Iachini et al, 2009; Lopez et al, 2018; Lopez et al, 2019; Muffato et al, 2015). Moreover, the geographical arrangements of the Italy and the area of Bari are different.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Memory for familiar locations: The impact of age, education and cognitive efficiency on two neuropsychological allocentric tasks

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This research aims to reconsider and support the use of spatial tasks based on familiar geographical information in the neuropsychological assessment of topographical (dis)orientation. Performance on two spatial tasks based on familiar information —l andmark positioning on a map and map of Italy — were compared in two studies assessing allocentric orientation among young and healthy elderly with different levels of education (Study 1) and elderly with and without probable cognitive impairment (Study 2). Results from Study 1 showed that the map of Italy task was affected by education, while the landmark positioning on a map was not. Results of Study 2 showed that both tasks were sensitive to different levels of cognitive functioning in a sample of community-dwelling seniors. Overall, spatial tasks based on mental representation of the hometown environment may be an important supplement in the assessment of allocentric topographical disorientation, discriminating typical from atypical aging.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 57%

Memory for familiar locations: The impact of age, education and cognitive efficiency on two neuropsychological allocentric tasks

2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Notwithstanding these age-related differences, it is important to mention that older participants achieved a high level of performance on the task and made few errors. It can be argued that this result stemmed from the simplicity of the virtual environment that contained a unique junction and three proximal landmarks (Moffat and Resnick, 2002 ; Caffò et al, 2018 ). Moreover, both place- and response-based strategies could be used to complete the task.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Differential Brain Activity in Regions Linked to Visuospatial Processing During Landmark-Based Navigation in Young and Healthy Older Adults

Ramanoël

Durteste

Bécu

et al. 2020

Front. Hum. Neurosci.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Older adults have difficulties in navigating unfamiliar environments and updating their wayfinding behavior when faced with blocked routes. This decline in navigational capabilities has traditionally been ascribed to memory impairments and dysexecutive function, whereas the impact of visual aging has often been overlooked. The ability to perceive visuospatial information such as salient landmarks is essential to navigating efficiently. To date, the functional and neurobiological factors underpinning landmark processing in aging remain insufficiently characterized. To address this issue, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to investigate the brain activity associated with landmark-based navigation in young and healthy older participants. The performances of 25 young adults (μ = 25.4 years, σ = 2.7; seven females) and 17 older adults (μ = 73.0 years, σ = 3.9; 10 females) were assessed in a virtual-navigation task in which they had to orient using salient landmarks. The underlying whole-brain patterns of activity as well as the functional roles of specific cerebral regions involved in landmark processing, namely the parahippocampal place area (PPA), the occipital place area (OPA), and the retrosplenial cortex (RSC), were analyzed. Older adults’ navigational abilities were overall diminished compared to young adults. Also, the two age groups relied on distinct navigational strategies to solve the task. Better performances during landmark-based navigation were associated with increased neural activity in an extended neural network comprising several cortical and cerebellar regions. Direct comparisons between age groups revealed that young participants had greater anterior temporal activity. Also, only young adults showed significant activity in occipital areas corresponding to the cortical projection of the central visual field during landmark-based navigation. The region-of-interest analysis revealed an increased OPA activation in older adult participants during the landmark condition. There were no significant between-group differences in PPA and RSC activations. These preliminary results hint at the possibility that aging diminishes fine-grained information processing in occipital and temporal regions, thus hindering the capacity to use landmarks adequately for navigation. Keeping sight of its exploratory nature, this work helps towards a better comprehension of the neural dynamics subtending landmark-based navigation and it provides new insights on the impact of age-related visuospatial processing differences on navigation capabilities.

show abstract

“…State‐of‐the‐art‐knowledge emphasises that old age is associated with functional decline in several very basic aspects of cognition such as executive function, attention, verbal and visual explicit memory, working memory, processing speed, and spatial cognition. With increasing age, an ensemble of basic representations and mechanisms supporting visuospatial perception, mental imagery and rotation, spatial memory, and metric‐property processing are compromised (e.g., Burgess, 2008; Caffò et al, 2018; Iachini, Iavarone, Senese, Ruotolo, & Ruggiero, 2009; Klencklen, Desprès, & Dufour, 2012; Lopez, Caffò, Spano, & Bosco, 2019; Moffat, 2009; Park & Schwarz, 2000; Sapkota, van der Linde, & Pardhan, 2020; Serino, Morganti, Di Stefano, & Riva, 2015). The ability to manage egocentric and allocentric spatial representations (to locate objects in relation to and independently of bodily space, respectively) decreases with aging (for a review, Colombo et al, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The impact of age and familiarity with the environment on categorical and coordinate spatial relation representations

Lopez

Caffò

Bosco

2021

Scandinavian J Psychology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Retrieving spatial information is a crucial everyday ability that is affected by age-related changes. Previous research has shown that this change is mediated by familiarity with an environment. The present research uses a series of landmark location tasks to extend and deepen our understanding of the role of aging in spatial mental representations of more or less familiar environments, also disentangling the contribution of coordinate and categorical spatial relations. The study tested the following hypotheses: (1) younger adults only have an advantage over the elderly in less familiar environments; (2) the advantage for categorical over coordinate spatial relations is mainly found for less familiar environments; and finally; (3) interactions between age, familiarity, and spatial relations might reveal that the effects of age and familiarity take different trajectories for coordinate and categorical spatial relations. Results confirmed that: (1) young people outperform the elderly only in less familiar environments; (2) there is a reduction in the difference between coordinate and categorical accuracy with increasing familiarity with the environment; while (3) the interaction between age and level of familiarity did not significantly differentiate coordinate from categorical spatial relations. In conclusion, the present study provides new evidence for the role of familiarity with geographical areas and its impact on the representation of categorical and coordinate relations, with practical implications for the assessment of topographical disorientation in aging.

show abstract

Spatial reorientation decline in aging: the combination of geometry and landmarks

Cited by 26 publications

References 80 publications

Memory for familiar locations: The impact of age, education and cognitive efficiency on two neuropsychological allocentric tasks

Memory for familiar locations: The impact of age, education and cognitive efficiency on two neuropsychological allocentric tasks

Differential Brain Activity in Regions Linked to Visuospatial Processing During Landmark-Based Navigation in Young and Healthy Older Adults

The impact of age and familiarity with the environment on categorical and coordinate spatial relation representations

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About