The Role of Environment Familiarity on Spatial Memory for Novel Objects: An Ageing Study N Merriman1, J Ondrej2, C O'Sullivan3, F Newell4 |
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1Multisensory Cognition Group, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland |
| We investigated whether familiarity with an environment affected performance on egocentric and allocentric spatial processing across older and younger adults. Although few studies have considered the role of familiar routes on spatial memory, some evidence suggests that older adults have preserved spatial recognition for familiar environments learned in the remote past [Rosenbaum et al., 2012, Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 4 (25), 1-10]. We created a virtual scene of a local environment through which participants passively navigated. Fifteen young (m=23 years) and 15 older (m=69 years) participants first provided familiarity ratings of the real environment. They were then shown two routes (one ‘familiar’ and one ’unfamiliar’) in which novel landmarks were embedded. Following learning, participants’ spatial memory was tested using 3 separate tasks: a landmark recognition test, a direction judgement task (egocentric processing), and a proximity judgement task (allocentric processing). We found poorer overall performance for the older than younger adults across all spatial tasks, although allocentric memory was worse for older adults. Environment familiarity was associated with improved landmark recognition and allocentric processing in older adults. These results suggest an important facilitatory role of environment familiarity on spatial memory for object locations in older adults |
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