Navigation ability in young, middle-aged and older adults: Different domains of knowledge and their relationship with visuospatial factors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jenvp.2022.101820Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Young, middle-aged and older adults learned a path by navigating in a garden.

  • Tasks were used to assess their landmark, location and path knowledge.

  • Individual visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations were tested.

  • Location-allocentric and non-situated path-survey knowledge decreased with age.

  • Individual visuospatial factors relate differently to spatial knowledge domains.

Abstract

Spatial navigation skills used in daily life are liable to decline with aging. They rely on a knowledge of landmarks, their locations (from egocentric and allocentric perspectives) and paths (learned in route and survey modes). This study investigated this knowledge in young, middle-aged and older people, also considering the role of individual visuospatial factors. Eighty-seven people in three age groups (20–30, 55–64, 65–75 years) were assessed on their visuospatial factors, and learned a path by walking in a real garden. Then their knowledge of landmarks (recognition task) and their positions (egocentric and allocentric pointing tasks), and the path (route repetition, order of landmarks, path finding and map drawing tasks) was tested. After controlling for sex and years of education, middle-aged and older adults performed similarly, and less well than young adults in allocentric pointing and map drawing tasks. Visuospatial working memory and sense of direction were the most influential individual factors, with specificity for each knowledge domain. In conclusion, the ability to use mental representations of environments learned from navigation relates to the domain of knowledge involved, age, and individual visuospatial factors.

Introduction

Learning a route from navigation is a skill commonly used in daily life that declines with age (Lester et al., 2017). Age-related differences vary, depending on the domain of knowledge tested (knowledge about landmarks, locations and paths; for a recent review, see van der Ham & Claessen, 2020), and are detectable already in middle age (Yu et al., 2021). The present study aimed to shed more light on the differences in spatial domains of knowledge in young, middle-aged and older adults.

According to a recent classification (van der Ham & Claessen, 2020), navigation demands knowledge about: landmarks (recalling the elements present in an environment); their locations from the observer's point of view (location-egocentric knowledge) or from an aerial perspective (location-allocentric knowledge); and the paths linking them, considered egocentrically (path-route knowledge) as a series of elements encountered along the way, or allocentrically (path-survey knowledge) as the links between elements as seen on a map (van der Ham & Claessen, 2020). For all the knowledge domains, some studies found age-related differences, while others did not, with findings proving more consistent for an age-related decline in path-survey knowledge (van der Ham & Claessen, 2020). Studies rarely examined more than one or two domains of knowledge together, however. Most of them investigated path-route and path-survey knowledge, generally finding a decline with aging in the latter, but not in the former (Gyselinck et al., 2013; Harris et al., 2012; Muffato et al., 2016, 2020; Wiener et al., 2013; Yu et al., 2021). There are some exceptions, however, with path-route knowledge declining and path-survey knowledge remaining intact (Taillade et al., 2016) or both types of knowledge unaffected by aging (Taillade et al., 2013), or both deteriorating (Merriman et al., 2016; van der Ham et al., 2020). When other types of spatial input are considered (apart from learning from navigation), allocentric and egocentric processing abilities have also been shown to decline differently with age (Colombo et al., 2017; Ruggiero et al., 2016). All these different results could be due to the research methods used (such as the types of input and the tasks administered). A clear picture that takes into account all domains of environment knowledge in aging (landmarks, locations and paths, considering both egocentric and allocentric components) is still missing, however. Another important point is that different tasks were generally used to assess the same domain of knowledge (see Table S1 for the tasks used and the main results). For instance, some tasks measured path knowledge from maps drawn on the strength of participants' mental representations of an environment, while others tested situated knowledge of an environment asking for the shortest way to a destination. Performance differs for people retrieving spatial information from memory or when situated in an environment. In the young at least, studies have shown that people asked to find the shortest way to a destination produced shorter, but more complex paths (with more streets and turns) while walking in a real-life environment than when describing the path from memory (Hölscher et al., 2011; Muffato et al., 2021). Walking along a real path, as opposed to doing so in our mind's eye, might give us access to visual information (landmarks, their locations and paths) that we can use to make adjustments along the way (Muffato et al., 2021). As older adults can be more field/context-dependent (Agathos et al., 2015), the type of task (situated vs non-situated) could partly explain the mixed findings on path learning in aging - an issue that, to our knowledge, has yet to be explored. Another reason why age-related differences in environment knowledge vary could concern people's individual visuospatial factors (Meneghetti et al., 2021), including: visuospatial processing abilities like visuospatial working memory (VSWM); higher-level visuospatial skills, such as mental rotation and visualization abilities; and also self-reported wayfinding inclinations, sense of direction, and pleasure in exploring (Meneghetti et al., 2021). VSWM and visuospatial abilities relating to navigation performance with aging, especially as regards path and location-allocentric knowledge (Kirasic, 2000; Muffato et al., 2020). Preliminary evidence also associates wayfinding inclinations with environment knowledge (Meneghetti et al., 2014).

The aim of the present study was to test people of different ages on the various domains of spatial knowledge (landmark, location-egocentric and -allocentric, path-route and -survey) they gained from navigating in a real environment, also considering the role of several individual factors.

Young, middle-aged (frequently neglected in previous studies; van der Ham et al., 2020) and older participants were assessed on their individual visuospatial factors, then learned a path through a real environment. Based on a literature review (see Table S1), their landmark knowledge was tested with a landmark recognition task, their location knowledge with egocentric and allocentric pointing tasks, their path-route knowledge with route repetition (situated) and landmark order (not-situated) tasks, and their path-survey knowledge with shortest path finding (situated) and map drawing (not situated) tasks.

After accounting for sex and years of education as individual differences related to spatial knowledge (Coutrot et al., 2019), we expected the involvement of age and visuospatial factors to differ, depending on the domain of knowledge tested. Landmark knowledge seemed likely to be the least affected (van der Ham & Claessen, 2020). Age and visuospatial abilities were expected relating to location-allocentric and path-survey knowledge, given the switch between learning from an egocentric perspective and testing from an allocentric perspective (Muffato et al., 2020; Richmond et al., 2018). Visuospatial abilities were expected to be less associated with location-egocentric and path-route knowledge (Muffato et al., 2016). Wayfinding inclinations were expected relating to performance, in path learning at least (Muffato & De Beni, 2020). The relationship of age and visuospatial factors with path knowledge was also expected to vary with tasks situated in the environment and others based on memory alone (non-situated), given the differences found between these two task conditions, in the young at least (Hölscher et al., 2011; Muffato et al., 2021). In aging, path-route and path-survey knowledge could relate not only to the egocentric and allocentric processing required to retrieve information from a mental representation in order to complete a spatial task, but also to whether people have the opportunity to make ongoing adjustments along the way (as in situated tasks), or have to rely only on their ability to mentally access spatial information (as in non-situated tasks).

Section snippets

Participants

The study involved 87 volunteers recruited by word of mouth, grouped by age: 30 young (20–30 years; 15 females; M age = 23.43, SD = 2.1); 27 middle-aged (55–64 years; 16 females; M age = 58.44, SD = 2.1); and 30 older (65–75 years; 15 females; M age = 68.43, SD = 3.28). Considering a maximum of 8 coefficients in the models (see results), an effect size of 0.25 and a p value of 0.01, a sample of 72 people would suffice to obtain a power of 0.80 (power analysis was run with the “pwr” library in

Results

Analyses were run using R (R Core Team, 2020). See Table 2, Table 3, and Fig. S3 in the Supplementary materials for the descriptive statistics, and Table S2 in the Supplementary materials for correlations between variables.

Binomial or linear regression models were run stepwise for each task, entering the predictors (continuous predictors were standardized) one at a time, and retaining them in subsequent models only if they lowered the AIC (Akaike Information Criterion; Wagenmakers & Farrell,

Discussion

The present study newly examined multiple domains of spatial navigation knowledge (of landmarks, locations and paths) gained from a navigation experience in relation to several individual visuospatial factors in young, middle-aged and older adults. Sex, as a control variable, did not relate to any domain of knowledge, but it is a factor to consider because of its association with navigation skills and age: it has revealed a role in the middle-aged, for instance (Yu et al., 2021), but not in

Authors' contributions

Veronica Muffato: Conceptualization, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Visualization.

Anna Simonetto: Methodology, Investigation.

Marilina Pellegrini: Methodology, Investigation.

Carla Tortora: Methodology, Investigation.

Chiara Meneghetti: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing - Original Draft, Writing - Review & Editing, Supervision.

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grants from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Ethics

The study was approved by the Ethical Committee for Psychological Research at the University of Padova (No. 38107BD1136B616271853E0C57666B12). All participants were informed about the purposes of the study and gave their written informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki (World Medical Association, 2013).

Data availability statement

Data are available on Figshare at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.19258319.v1.

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Acknowledgments

The present work was conducted as part of the Dipartimenti di Eccellenza research program (art.1, commi 314–337 legge 232/2016), supported by a grant from MIUR to the Department of General Psychology, University of Padua. The authors thank the municipality of Bassano del Grappa (Vicenza, Italy) for giving permission to use the Parolini garden as a setting for the research.

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