The effect of aging on route memorization.

Résumé En

When we follow a route in an unknown city, we build a mental representation of the environment, which is stored in long-term memory and could be used later in different kind of tasks like recognizing the place, redoing the route, or drawing a map. In this experiment, we focus on the cognitive resources that are used to build and then manipulate that mental representation, and the effect of aging on the spatial representation. Previous research has demonstrated age-related decline in the use of spatial representation, but the spatial representation is complex and requires the integration of many components that may show differential susceptibility to aging. Different tasks were used to assess the effect of aging on different components of the spatial representation. The video of an unfamiliar route in a city near Paris was projected to the young and older participants twice. After the presentation, four tasks were used to assess the mental representation of the participants (visual recognition task, direction decision task, order decision task, and statement verification). Different tests were used to identify the factors that explain individual differences in the performance. The results show that older adults have poorer performance than younger adults in the 4 tasks. Analyses of mediation show that the effect of aging on visual recognition task would be explained by the impairment of episodic memory. Moreover, the effect of aging on the direction task would be explained by the impairment of working memory.