The Road More Travelled: The Differential Effects of Spatial Experience in Young and Elderly Participants

Abstract

Our spatial mental representations allow us to give refined descriptions of the environment in terms of the relative locations and distances between objects and landmarks. In this study, we investigated the effects of familiarity with the everyday environment, in terms of frequency of exploration and mode of transportation, on categorical and coordinate spatial relations, on young and elderly participants, controlling for socio-demographic factors. Participants were tested with a general anamnesis, a neuropsychological assessment, measures of explorations and the Landmark Positioning on a Map task. The results showed: (a) a modest difference in performance with categorical spatial relations; (b) a larger difference in coordinate spatial relations; (c) a significant moderating effect of age on the relationship between familiarity and spatial relations, with a stronger relation among the elderly than the young. Ceteris paribus, the role of direct experience with exploring their hometown on spatial mental representations appeared to be more important in the elderly than in the young. This advantage appears to make the elderly wiser and likely protects them from the detrimental effects of aging on spatial mental representations.

Map Learning in Aging Individuals: The Role of Cognitive Functioning and Visuospatial Factors

“…However, when the list of the landmarks was provided, the older adults missed as many landmarks as the young adults did in the map drawing task (after controlling for gender and education), suggesting that providing a cue mitigates the free recall difficulties [41]. Considering the positions of landmarks (above/below, left/right with respect to the other landmarks) and their distances (near/far from) in the map drawing task, the results expand the knowledge obtained using other types of knowledge acquisition [10,11] after map learning (figural scale input [2]). Considering the amount of variance explained (age effect accounted for 23% of variance in distance accuracy and 15% in canonical accuracy), our results seem to confirm a stronger age-related difference for distance relations than for categorical relations [10,11], even after the learning of a map.…”

“…Considering the positions of landmarks (above/below, left/right with respect to the other landmarks) and their distances (near/far from) in the map drawing task, the results expand the knowledge obtained using other types of knowledge acquisition [10,11] after map learning (figural scale input [2]). Considering the amount of variance explained (age effect accounted for 23% of variance in distance accuracy and 15% in canonical accuracy), our results seem to confirm a stronger age-related difference for distance relations than for categorical relations [10,11], even after the learning of a map. Underlying neuronal mechanisms may elucidate this difference.…”

“…Concerning information about landmarks, we hypothesized that the general memory impairment that comes with aging [29] could cause difficulty with the recall of the landmarks learned from a map in older adults compared with young people, with a worsening taking place between young-olds and old-olds [30]. Concerning the categorical and distance relations, age-related effects are expected, with a more pronounced worsening with increasing age for distance relations, as found with other learning inputs (e.g., [11]). However, here, for the first time, categorical and distance relations were analyzed after map learning.…”

“…Such categorical relations and distance relations (the interobject distances, near to/far from) are two aspects related to the quality and precision of a spatial mental representation [9]. Previous research has shown a decrease in performance regarding distance relations with aging and lower age-related differences in categorical spatial relations [10], even when testing mental representations of environments familiar to participants [11]. However, these two aspects of the mental representation qualityposition accuracy (categorical relations) and distance accuracy (distance relations)-have not yet been analyzed after map learning in aging individuals.…”

Cognitive Efficiency and Fitness-to-Drive along the Lifespan: The Mediation Effect of Visuospatial Transformations

“…Finally, the employment of more ecological measures of driving performance with respect to those used in this study (i.e., simulated driving and real-world driving) may help to clarify whether the effects of both mental rotation and perspective-taking would be observable even on simulated and/or real-world driving [63]. Similarly, models presented here could benefit from the inclusion of measures of topographical representations (i.e., egocentric and allocentric) [22,64,65] in order to also study the role of large-scale spatial representations, thus making possible a more complex predictive model.…”