Cognitive aging
Once older adults learn a route, what do they still get wrong?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Healthy older adults needed more practice to learn routes but then knew most parts of them as well as young adults, whereas older adults with lower cognitive screening scores struggled with landmark-direction links and map recognition.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Three pre-existing groups (young, older with MoCA 26-30, older with MoCA 22-25) each learned 12 short virtual routes to criterion, then did four route-knowledge tests and a final route recall; mixed-effects models with two planned contrasts.
- N
- N=49 · 16 young adults plus 33 older adults (17 in the high-MoCA group, 16 in the low-MoCA group); one further older participant scoring below 22 was excluded.
- Population
- Young adults aged 18-29 and community-dwelling adults aged 65 and over in the UK
- Outcome
- Trials needed to learn each route, route recall after testing, and accuracy on landmark-direction, landmark-sequence, direction-sequence and map-recognition (perspective taking) tasks
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Key findings
Both older groups needed about 2.8 viewings to learn a route versus about 1.2 for young adults. Final route recall fell from about 94% in young adults to 79% in the high-MoCA group and 65% in the low-MoCA group, suggesting faster forgetting with age and with lower MoCA scores. Once analyses were restricted to routes still remembered, healthy older adults matched young adults on landmark directions, landmark order and map recognition and were worse only on the order of turns. The low-MoCA group was markedly worse than the high-MoCA group on landmark directions and on map recognition, and a MoCA-matched comparison suggested these differences reflected cognitive status rather than age.
Methodology
Sixteen young adults and 33 older adults, split by a cognitive screening test (MoCA) into a high-scoring group and a lower-scoring group suggestive of early impairment, watched videos of short routes through a virtual environment. Each person was trained on every route until they could state every turn correctly, so all groups started testing from the same level of learning. They then answered four tests: which way to turn at each landmark, the order of landmarks, the order of turns, and which of three maps showed the route, before recalling the route one last time.
Limitations
Groups were small (16 or 17 each) and pre-existing, so they differ in more than age or MoCA score; the low-MoCA group was also older. The MoCA is a screening tool, so the low-scoring group is not a clinically diagnosed MCI group. Routes were short (four intersections), passively viewed videos rather than active navigation, which may favour memorising a turn sequence. The authors note that no single test fully captured route knowledge and that the low-MoCA group may have used strategies the tests did not measure.
How this study connects
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