Effects of Age on Memory for Spatial Location: A Multiple Target Task
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Authors
Pratt, Angela K.
Issue Date
1996
Type
Thesis
Language
en_US
Keywords
Alternative Title
Abstract
Previous research has suggested that people depend on an internal representation of
their environmental surroundings in order to accurately reproduce a spatial target
location. Although research indicates that many aspects of cognitive ability decrease
with age, specific aspects involving cognitive mapping and target localization (TL)
processes have only focused on younger populations. This study examined 12 healthy
older adults and 12 healthy younger adults on a TL task and a short battery of
neuropsychological tests. The TL task included two targets and explored the effects
of age, gender, and task complexity on centimeters error from the final target
destination. An ANOVA with repeated measures revealed significant main effects of
age for all complex conditions involving moving to two targets. However, no
significant age effects were found when participants walked to only one target. This
indicates that when older individuals are distracted by first walking (with or without a
guide) to an intermediate point before walking to their final destination, they perform
worse than younger individuals. Results did not show any significant gender effects.
Description
vii, 53 p.
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License
U.S. copyright laws protect this material. Commercial use or distribution of this material is not permitted without prior written permission of the copyright holder. All rights reserved.