title: Spatial cognition and behavior in young and elderly adults: implications for learning new environments.
abstract: Young and elderly women's performances on scene-recognition, distance-ranking, route-execution, and map-placement tasks were compared in familiar and novel supermarkets to seek evidence of an age-related deficit in spatial cognitive performance, a benefit of environmental familiarity, and an age-related decrement in the efficiency of spatial learning. Results suggested that younger adults acquired spatial information in a novel environment more quickly than did elderly adults, but findings indicated neither an age-related deficit in spatial cognitive performance nor a benefit of environmental familiarity. Scores from psychometric tests produced low correlations with cognitive task performance. Of the behaviors observed during exploration and route execution, only 1 was significantly correlated with cognitive task performance. Standing without scanning was negatively correlated with performance on 3 tasks for elderly adults only.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, University of South Carolina, Columbia 29208.
authors.forename: K C
authors.initials: KC
authors.lastname: Kirasic
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000368:Aged; D000369:Aged, 80 and over / Q000523:psychology; D000375:Aging / Q000523:psychology*; D001076:Aptitude; D003071:Cognition; D004215:Distance Perception; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007092:Imagination; D008297:Male; D011939:Mental Recall; D008875:Middle Aged; D009949:Orientation; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D012153:Retention, Psychology; D012931:Social Environment; D013028:Space Perception