Cognitive aging
Can older adults use symmetry and meaning to remember visual patterns?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
Older adults remembered fewer grid patterns than young adults overall, but they gained just as much as young adults when patterns were symmetrical, whereas only young adults gained when patterns looked like familiar shapes.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Human experiment — Two cross-sectional mixed-factorial experiments: age group (younger vs older) × pattern type (random, vertical, horizontal or diagonal symmetry in Exp 1; low vs high semantic affordance in Exp 2), with an ascending visual-matrix span procedure
- N
- N=70 · Experiment 2 had 70 participants (40 younger, 30 older). The same 30 older adults took part in Experiment 1, but the Experiment 1 participant description and the Introduction are missing from the available text, so the total Experiment 1 sample is not stated here.
- Population
- Younger adult psychology students (Northumbria, UK; and a Rome sample in Exp 1) and community older adults
- Outcome
- Visual matrix span (the largest pattern size recalled correctly) in each pattern condition
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Key findings
In both experiments older adults had much lower spans than younger adults (for example 4.25 versus 6.63 averaged over conditions in Experiment 1). Symmetry raised span for both age groups, with vertical and horizontal symmetry helping most, and there was no age-by-symmetry interaction, so older adults benefited as much as the young. In Experiment 2, however, there was a significant age-by-meaning interaction: young adults did better with high-meaning patterns, while older adults showed no reliable gain.
Methodology
Younger and older adults saw grids with some cells filled in, held the pattern in mind for a moment, and then reproduced it; patterns grew larger until they failed, giving a 'span' score. In Experiment 1 the patterns were either random or had vertical, horizontal or diagonal symmetry, shown for 3 seconds. In Experiment 2 the patterns were pre-rated as either low or high in 'semantic affordance', meaning how easily they could be seen as a familiar object or symbol; 40 younger and 30 older adults took part.
Limitations
The design is cross-sectional, so age differences could partly reflect cohort differences such as education or familiarity with computer tasks rather than ageing itself. The older adults did both experiments, so some practice transfer between tasks is possible, and the authors note they lacked a detailed cognitive profile of the older group. The study shows older adults did not spontaneously benefit from meaning, but it does not test why (executive attention, processing speed or strategy use are only proposed), nor whether instructions to use meaning would help. The Experiment 1 participant details are missing from the available text, and response methods differed between the two testing sites.
How this study connects
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