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Abstract
Aging coincides with a decline in navigation and wayfinding abilities, but it is unclear to what extent factors relating to a given individual may contribute to mitigating this decline. The present study aims to analyze how older adults’ objective cognitive functioning and self-reported subjective wayfinding inclinations predict their navigation performance. Sixty-four older adults were assessed on their general cognitive functioning (all scoring from 22 to 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA), visuospatial working memory (VSWM), and perspective-taking abilities. Their self-assessed wayfinding inclinations (such as their sense of direction, pleasure in exploring places, and spatial anxiety) were also examined. Then participants learned a path in an environment from video navigation and performed a route repetition task (which maintained the same egocentric perspective as the learning phase), and a sketch map task (which involved switching from an egocentric perspective used in the learning phase to an allocentric perspective). The results showed that positive wayfinding inclinations (in terms of pleasure in exploring) related to participants’ route repetition accuracy, while their general cognitive performance (MoCA scores) related to their sketch map drawing accuracy. Individual factors such as cognitive functioning and wayfinding inclinations relate differently to older people’s navigation performance, depending on the demands of the tasks used to test their environment learning.
Highlights
Being able to navigate in the environment is fundamental to everyday life, and any impairments in this domain can limit people’s independence and safety
As for the sketch map task: step 0 accounted for 17% of the variance, but no predictors were significant; step 1 accounted for another 14%, with Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) score a significant predictor (β = 0.39, p = 0.005); step 2 accounted for 4% of the variance, with no factors emerging as significant predictors
Objective cognitive factors—and MoCA scores in particular—related to the sketch map task, which demands a switch from egocentric to allocentric knowledge
Summary
Being able to navigate in the environment is fundamental to everyday life, and any impairments in this domain can limit people’s independence and safety. The present study aims to analyze the influence of individual factors—both cognitive skills (i.e., general cognitive level and visuospatial abilities) and self-reported wayfinding inclinations—on route learning from navigation in aging This learning is measured in terms of the ability to repeat a previouslylearned path and to place the landmarks learned on a sketch map. Cognitive abilities can be expected to have a role in the task requiring a switch from egocentric to allocentric knowledge (the sketch map task) This aspect is newly explored, considering VSWM and perspective-taking ability (found to influence navigation, Muffato et al, 2019b), and general cognitive level. After taking cognitive abilities into account, self-reported wayfinding inclinations are expected to influence navigation performance (Muffato et al, 2019a), and are explored in relation to the demands of the task
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