Age-related differences in visual encoding and response strategies contribute to spatial memory deficits
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Age-related differences in visual encoding and response strategies contribute to spatial memory deficits Vladislava Segen 1,2
&
Marios N. Avraamides 3,4 & Timothy J. Slattery 2 & Jan M. Wiener 1,2
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Successful navigation requires memorising and recognising the locations of objects across different perspectives. Although these abilities rely on hippocampal functioning, which is susceptible to degeneration in older adults, little is known about the effects of ageing on encoding and response strategies that are used to recognise spatial configurations. To investigate this, we asked young and older participants to encode the locations of objects in a virtual room shown as a picture on a computer screen. Participants were then shown a second picture of the same room taken from the same (0°) or a different perspective (45° or 135°) and had to judge whether the objects occupied the same or different locations. Overall, older adults had greater difficulty with the task than younger adults although the introduction of a perspective shift between encoding and testing impaired performance in both age groups. Diffusion modelling revealed that older adults adopted a more conservative response strategy, while the analysis of gaze patterns showed an age-related shift in visual-encoding strategies with older adults attending to more information when memorising the positions of objects in space. Overall, results suggest that ageing is associated with declines in spatial processing abilities, with older individuals shifting towards a more conservative decision style and relying more on encoding target object positions using room-based cues compared to younger adults, who focus more on encoding the spatial relationships among object clusters. Keywords Aging . Decision making . Eye movements . Spatial cognition . Perception
Introduction The ability to recognise a place from different perspectives is crucial for everyday functioning. It requires remembering the locations of objects relative to each other or relative to the environment (Epstein, Harris, Stanley, & Kanwisher, 1999), and depends on the binding of the memory for object identity with the memory for its location (Postma, Kessels, & van Asselen, 2008; Waller, 2006). The quality of such spatial Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01089-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Vladislava Segen [email protected] 1
Ageing and Dementia Research Centre, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK
2
Department of Psychology, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, UK
3
Department of Psychology, University of Cyprus, Nicosia, Cyprus
4
Rise Nicosia, Cyprus
representations depends on the resolution with which spatial information is encoded (Cowell, Barense, & Sadil, 2019; Ekstrom & Yonelinas, 2020). A coarse spatial representation, for example, may only contain the categorical positions of the objects, such as “the door is in the far right o
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