Adult age differences in spatial memory: effects of distinctiveness and repeated experience.

Young (mean age = 25.0) and elderly (mean age = 65.0) women's memory for buildings in a large model town was assessed. Participants viewed and constructed the town on two trials. Building distinctiveness was manipulated by showing differentiated buildings with unique physical and functional properties (e.g., school, gas station), or nondifferentiated buildings that were not functionally distinct and only somewhat physically distinct (e.g., red cube-like structure with curved roof, yellow cube-like structure with flat roof). Building distinctiveness was further manipulated by verbally labeling or not labeling each building type. On Trial 1 young adults were more accurate than elderly adults only on the differentiated buildings; on Trial 2 this age difference was evident on differentiated and nondifferentiated buildings. Verbal labeling did not significantly affect construction accuracy. It was concluded that age differences occurred because elderly adults have more difficulty utilizing encoding strategies than young adults.

Adults' mental rotation of spatial information: effects of age, sex and cerebral laterality.

The mental rotation ability of young (mean age = 25.3) and elderly adults (mean age = 65.3) was assessed. Preferred cerebral hemisphere for information processing was determined by asking subjects questions designed to elicit lateral eye movements. Subjects were classified as preferring the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, or neither hemisphere (mixed dominance). Participants were then given a task requiring them to match rotated blocks used in the Shepard and Metzler [13] experiment. Young subjects were more accurate than elderly subjects and males were more accurate than females at both age levels. There was no difference in accuracy as a function of preferred hemisphere for information processing. It was concluded that: (1) there may be no relationship between preferred hemisphere for processing and accuracy on a mental rotation task (2) there are age-related changes in the accuracy of mental rotation, and (3) males perform more accurately than females throughout adulthood on mental rotation tasks.

Spatial knowledge of young and elderly adults: scene recognition from familiar and novel perspectives.

Thirty young adults (mean age = 25.3) and 30 elderly adults (mean age = 65.3) were tested on a memory task in which they were asked to recognize environmental scenes from familiar and novel perspectives. Participants initially viewed slides of 10 business and 10 residential street intersections. Pairs of intersections were then presented and subjects were asked to select the intersection viewed previously. During the recognition phase subjects saw the intersections from the original perspective (0 degrees), rotated 90 degrees from the original perspective, or rotated 180 degrees from the original perspective. Young adults were more accurate than elderly adults and accuracy was greater for business than residential scenes at both age levels. Subjects were more accurate in the 0 than 180 degree condition, while performance in the 90 degree condition was significantly less accurate than in the other two conditions. These results indicate that (1) young adults have better recognition memory than elderly adults for real world scenes, and (2) environmental differentiation aids recognition memory for spatial locations.

Adult age differences in metamemory.

Metamemory abilities were compared among three age groups, 18 to 31, 60 to 69, and 70 to 79 years. These groups were compared with respect to their memory knowledge about the relative difficulty of memorizing low- and high-imagery and low- and high-frequency words. The three age groups were similar in their predictions of the number of words they could recall but differed in the number they actually did knowledge of these word types declines with age.

Lateral eye movements and the recall of spatial information in a familiar, large-scale environment.

The relationship between cerebral asymmetry and memory for locations in a familial large-scale environment was examined. Subjects were classified as showing a preference for right or left hemisphere processing on the basis of the direction of their lateral eye movements. Knowledge of the locations of 10 landmarks in a familial large-scale space was assessed. No differences were found between right and left movers. It was concluded that memory for the location of landmarks in a familiar large-scale space is processed equally effectively by those who prefer to process information with the right or left hemisphere.

Spatial knowledge of ambulatory and wheelchair-confined nursing home residents.

The spatial knowledge of ambulatory (Mean Age=80.5) and wheelchair-confined (Mean Age=76.2) nursing home residents was assessed. Subjects were asked to locate the position of salient nursing home landmarks on a schematic of the nursing home. The results suggested no difference in the spatial knowledge of ambulatory and wheelchair-confined residents. Age and frequency of encountering landmarks were related to accuracy while time of residency was unrelated to accuracy.