Abstract
Ageing is associated with declines in spatial memory, however, the source of these deficits remains unclear. Here we used eye-tracking to investigate age-related differences in spatial encoding strategies and the cognitive processes underlying the age-related deficits in spatial memory tasks. To do so we asked young and older participants to encode the locations of objects in a virtual room shown as a picture on a computer screen. The availability and utility of room-based landmarks were manipulated by removing landmarks, presenting identical landmarks rendering them uninformative, or by presenting unique landmarks that could be used to encode object locations. In the test phase, participants viewed a second picture of the same room taken from the same (0°) or a different perspective (30°) and judged whether the objects occupied the same or different locations in the room. We found that the introduction of a perspective shift and swapping of objects between encoding and testing impaired performance in both age groups. Furthermore, our results revealed that although older adults performed the task as well as younger participants, they relied on different visual encoding strategies to solve the task. Specifically, gaze analysis revealed that older adults showed a greater preference towards a more categorical encoding strategy in which they formed relationships between objects and landmarks.
Highlights
Successful navigation and orientation depend on our ability to recognise familiar places across different perspectives (Waller & Nadel, 2013)
Accuracy estimates were obtained for each participant with Age Group, Perspective Shift, Landmark Type and Manipulation as fixed factors and a random by-subject and by-item intercept
There was an interaction between Perspective Shift and Manipulation with a greater decline in performance in the No Change condition compared to the Swap condition following a 30° Perspective Shift (Fig. 2c)
Summary
Successful navigation and orientation depend on our ability to recognise familiar places across different perspectives (Waller & Nadel, 2013) In the lab, this ability is typically assessed with tasks in which participants first encode an array of objects or environmental features from one perspective and are asked to indicate whether the array has changed when presented from a different perspective. This ability is typically assessed with tasks in which participants first encode an array of objects or environmental features from one perspective and are asked to indicate whether the array has changed when presented from a different perspective Studies using such paradigms have reported age-related declines in performance (Hartley et al, 2007; Hilton et al., 2020; Montefinese et al, 2015; Muffato et al, 2019; Segen et al, 2020). That is, compared to younger participants, older adults found it harder to detect that two objects had swapped locations than when one of the objects was replaced with a new object
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