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The present study investigated whether older adults' visuospatial working memory shows effects of environmental support for rehearsal similar to those observed in young adults (Lilienthal, Hale, & Myerson, 2014). When the duration of interitem intervals was 4 s and participants had sufficient time to rehearse, location memory spans were larger in both age groups when environmental support was present than when support was absent. Critically, however, the age-related difference in memory was actually larger when support was provided, suggesting that young and older adults may differ in their rehearsal of to-be-remembered locations. (PsycINFO Database Record [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Normal aging impairs the representation and integration (binding) of spatial and temporal Context in episodic memory. We directly compare age differences in episodic memory in relation to processing spatial and temporal context. As part of the COGITO study, 101 younger and 103 older participants trained an object-location serial recall task for 100 sessions. Training exacerbated the recall deficit of older relative to younger adults. Younger adults improved in recall performance on both spatial and temporal dimensions. In contrast, older adults improved on the spatial dimension only. Individual differences in pretest performance and change were positively correlated across dimensions among younger adults but negatively related among older adults. We conclude that older adults are impaired at simultaneously processing spatial and temporal context and preferentially process spatial at the expense of temporal context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Younger and older adults who were either monolingual or bilingual were tested with verbal and spatial working memory (WM) span tasks. Aging was associated with a greater decline in spatial WM than in verbal WM, but the age-related declines were equivalent in both language groups. The bilingual participants outperformed the monolinguals in spatial WM, but achieved lower levels of performance than monolinguals in verbal WM. This interaction between bilingualism and WM domain was also consistent across the adult life span. These results are discussed in terms of the interactions between a domain-general executive processing advantage for bilinguals and the domain-specific content of particular WM tasks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has shown that nonspatial features, including semantic categories, can bias younger adults' spatial location memory. For example, semantically related information is remembered as being closer in space than semantically unrelated information (Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986). These findings suggest that verbal information is concurrently encoded with spatial information and influences younger adults' spatial information retrieval. The present study explored whether older adults have a similar dependency between verbal and spatial information. In Experiment 1, older and younger adults learned maps depicting semantically categorizable landmarks. After learning, participants completed landmark free recall and distance estimation tasks. Younger adults recalled more landmarks from semantically organized maps compared with older adults. In addition, younger adults were more likely to underestimate the distance between semantically related landmarks than were older adults. Experiment 2 examined whether supportive instructions would influence older adults' use of verbal information when learning maps. When given instructions that encouraged semantic feature use, older adults remembered more landmarks, were more likely to cluster landmarks semantically, and demonstrated biases in distance estimation based on semantic relationships. These findings suggest that verbal influences on spatial/map learning in older adults depends on explicit instructions or environmental support at encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study tests the hypothesis that aging-induced cognitive permeation of sensorimotor functions contributes to adult age differences in spatial navigation performance. Virtual maze-like museums were projected in front of a treadmill. Sixteen 20-30-year-old men and sixteen 60-70-year-old men performed a way-finding task in city-block or variable topographies while walking with or without support. Walking support attenuated age-related decrements in navigational learning. Navigation load increased trunk-angle variability for older adults only. Age differences in spatial knowledge persisted despite perfect place-finding performance. City-block topography was easier than variable topography for younger adults only, indicating age-related differences in reliance on spatial relational learning. Attempts at supporting older adults' navigation performance should consider sensorimotor/cognitive interactions and qualitative differences in navigational activity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]