The impact of age and familiarity with the environment on categorical and coordinate spatial relation representations

Retrieving spatial information is a crucial everyday ability that is affected by age‐related changes. Previous research has shown that this change is mediated by familiarity with an environment. The present research uses a series of landmark location tasks to extend and deepen our understanding of the role of aging in spatial mental representations of more or less familiar environments, also disentangling the contribution of coordinate and categorical spatial relations. The study tested the following hypotheses: (1) younger adults only have an advantage over the elderly in less familiar environments; (2) the advantage for categorical over coordinate spatial relations is mainly found for less familiar environments; and finally; (3) interactions between age, familiarity, and spatial relations might reveal that the effects of age and familiarity take different trajectories for coordinate and categorical spatial relations. Results confirmed that: (1) young people outperform the elderly only in less familiar environments; (2) there is a reduction in the difference between coordinate and categorical accuracy with increasing familiarity with the environment; while (3) the interaction between age and level of familiarity did not significantly differentiate coordinate from categorical spatial relations. In conclusion, the present study provides new evidence for the role of familiarity with geographical areas and its impact on the representation of categorical and coordinate relations, with practical implications for the assessment of topographical disorientation in aging

Bone mineral · Family medicine · Fragility · Fragility fracture · Osteoporosis · Physical therapy · Bone fractures and treatments · Bone health and osteoporosis research · Hip and Femur Fractures · Internal Medicine · Medicine

• The Road More Travelled

  Open Access•Antonella Lopez, Alessandro Germani et al.•International Journal of…•2021

  Incluir item

• Screening Tests for Geriatric Depression

  T L Brink, Jerome A Yesavage et al.•Clinical Gerontologist•1982

  Incluir item

• Invariants of Human Behavior

  Herbert A Simon•Annual Review of Psychology•1990

  Incluir item

• Assessing Self‐maintenance

  Open Access•Sidney Katz•Journal of the American…•1983

  Incluir item

• Statistical power analyses using G*Power 3.1

  Open Access•Franz Faul, Edgar Erdfelder et al.•Behavior Research Methods•2009

  Incluir item

• The Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA

  Open Access•Ziad S Nasreddine, Ziad Nasreddine et al.•Journal of the American…•2005

  Incluir item

• How to separate coordinate and categorical spatial relation components in integrated spatial representations

  Open Access•Antonella Lopez, Alessandro O Caffò et al.•Scandinavian Journal of Psychology•2020

  Incluir item

• The Nature of Geographic Knowledge

  Reginald G Golledge•Annals of the Association of…•2002

  Incluir item

• Assessment of Older People

  M P Lawton, Elaine Brody et al.•The Gerontologist•1969

  Incluir item

• The orientation of young and older adults' mental representations of their home town with familiar and new landmarks

  Open Access•Veronica Muffato, Chiara Meneghetti et al.•British Journal of Psychology•2020

  Incluir item