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Abstract:
The purpose of this study was to assess age differences in
navigational behavior in a virtual environment (VE) and to examine
the relationship between VE navigation and psychometric measures of
cognitive aging. Participants (N=117, ages 22-91) completed a
battery of cognitive tests and a computerized VE navigation task.
The VE consisted of a richly textured series of interconnected
hallways, some leading to dead ends and others leading to a
designated goal location. Participants attempted to find the goal
over 5 successive trials. Over successive trials, participants
learned the layout of the environment as reflected by the decrease
in both the time to completion and number of spatial memory errors
committed. However, older volunteers took longer to solve each
trial and made significantly more spatial memory errors than
younger participants. After 5 learning trials, 86% of young and 24%
of elderly volunteers were able to locate the goal without error.
After controlling for age, performance on the VE navigation task
was positively correlated with measures of mental rotation and
verbal and visual memory. No other cognitive domains predicted VE
navigational skill. These results demonstrate that with appropriate
adaptations, VE technology may be used to assess spatial navigation
in elderly participants. Furthermore, our findings reveal
age-related deficits in elderly individuals on a laboratory measure
of spatial navigation.
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