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Previous research has suggested that individual characteristics, such as personality traits, are crucial for pro-environmental behaviors. However, the joint role of more specific environment-related individual dispositions on various pro-environmental behaviors has not yet been investigated and is the aim of this study. A total of 649 adults (18-59 years old) assessed their pro-environmental behaviors, personality traits, the connectedness to nature, attitudes toward exploration, and spatial anxiety. Personality traits (openness and conscientiousness) were related to some of the pro-environment behaviors (transportations and purchasing). Connectedness to nature was the factor most associated with the pro-environment behaviors (conservation, citizenship, purchasing). Moreover, newly we showed that attitudes toward exploration were associated with citizenship and purchasing behaviors. Overall, the results newly highlighted the importance of environment-related characteristics alongside general personality traits. Fostering environmental-related personality factors, such as connection to nature and attitudes towards exploration, may drive positive environmental action, suggesting novel approaches to build a more sustainable society., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision., (Copyright © 2025 Muffato, Miola, Pazzaglia and Meneghetti.)

Navigating environments is a fundamental ability of daily life, with survey knowledge playing a crucial role. Survey knowledge varies between individuals, and these variations may be related to individual differences in visuospatial working memory (VSWM) ability. However, other factors, such as the modalities of recall (cued vs. free recall) of survey knowledge, could interact with VSWM resources. The present study aimed to clarify whether various types of VSWM contribute to survey knowledge under specific recall modalities or regardless of how spatial information is retrieved. A sample of 74 young adults performed VSWM tasks with varying processing demands and degrees of active involvement. Then, they actively learned a virtual city path in a Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) environment, and their survey knowledge was assessed using a sketch map task in free and cued recall modalities (within-participants). Cued recall demonstrated an advantage in sketch map accuracy over free recall. VSWM with simultaneous processing and active mental imagery is associated with sketch map accuracy, but not other VSWM. Importantly, no interaction was found between VSWM and the modality of recall. Therefore, survey knowledge is primarily related to VSWM, regardless of recall modality, emphasizing the importance of VSWM ability in capturing survey knowledge after active navigation., Competing Interests: Declarations. Conflict of interest: The authors declare no competing interests. Ethical approval: This study was performed in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Approval was granted by the The Ethical Committee for Psychological Research at University of Padova (Date 03/04/2023, No. A869A99C17F2C8381604FA0767E6DFFC). Consent to participate: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study., (© 2024. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Background and Objectives: Navigational skills display clear signs of decline with increasing age, especially in pathological aging. Therefore, navigability-the extent to which destinations can be reached with reasonable effort and time-should be considered in residential care home design. We aimed to develop a scale assessing environmental features (i.e., indoor visual differentiation, signage, and layout) for navigability in residential care homes: the Residential Care Home Navigability (RCHN) scale. To this end, we examined whether navigability and its factors were associated with a sense of direction within the residential care homes to different degrees for older adult residents, caregivers, and staff. The relationship between navigability and residential satisfaction was also considered., Research Design and Methods: A sample of 523 participants (230 residents, 126 family caregivers, and 167 staff members) responded to the RCHN, assessed their sense of orientation and general satisfaction, and performed a pointing task., Results: Results confirmed the RCHN scale's 3-level factor structure, good reliability, and validity. A subjective sense of direction, but not pointing task performance, was associated with navigability and its factors. In particular, visual differentiation is positively associated with a sense of direction regardless of group, whereas signage and layout contributed to a better experience of a sense of direction, especially among older residents. Navigability was not related to residents' satisfaction., Discussion and Implications: Navigability supports perceived orientation in residential care homes, especially for older residents. Moreover, the RCHN is a reliable tool for the assessment of RCHN, with important implications for minimizing spatial disorientation through environmental interventions., (© The Author(s) 2023. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Gerontological Society of America. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com.)

Introduction: Self-evaluations about orientation and navigation in the environment contribute to individual differences in spatial cognition. Evidence suggests that they may change, even slightly, with the progression of adulthood. It is necessary to improve the framing of environment-related subjective self-evaluations in adulthood and aging by examining how they change and the factors related to them. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the developmental trajectories of sense of direction, spatial anxiety, and attitude in exploring place across the adult lifespan while also considering gender and education., Materials and Methods: A sample of 1,946 participants (1,068 women), aged 18-87 years, completed the sense of direction and spatial representation, spatial anxiety, and attitude in exploring scales., Results: The regression models showed a linear increase in sense of direction with age, stable spatial anxiety until age 66 years when anxiety began increasing, and a stable attitude in exploring with a deflection by age 71 years. Gender played a role in all three types of self-evaluations, with men reporting higher ratings in sense of direction and attitude toward exploring (especially in older men), and lower levels of spatial anxiety than women did. Education also played a role, with higher education years associated with lower ratings in spatial anxiety and a higher sense of direction, nullifying gender differences in the latter., Discussion: These results offer, in the spatial cognition framework, a better understanding of how specific environment-related self-evaluations develop with age and related factors, such as education. This underscores the importance of enhancing them, particularly in women and older adults., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Muffato, Miola, Pazzaglia and Meneghetti.)

When learning an environment from virtual navigation people gain knowledge about landmarks, their locations, and the paths that connect them. The present study newly aimed to investigate all these domains of knowledge and how cognitive factors such as visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations might support virtual passive navigation. A total of 270 participants (145 women) were tested online. They: (i) completed visuospatial tasks and answered questionnaires on their wayfinding inclinations; and (ii) learnt a virtual path. The environmental knowledge they gained was assessed on their free recall of landmarks, their egocentric and allocentric pointing accuracy (location knowledge), and their performance in route direction and landmark location tasks (path knowledge). Visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations emerged as two separate factors, and environmental knowledge as a single factor. The SEM model showed that both visuospatial abilities and wayfinding inclinations support the environmental knowledge factor, with similar pattern of relationships in men and women. Overall, factors related to the individual are relevant to the environmental knowledge gained from an online virtual passive navigation., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

This study examined the available literature concerning the association between sleep quality and quality of life (QoL) in autonomous older people with no sleep disorders. A systematic review and meta-analysis were conducted on studies identified in the PsycInfo, PubMed and Scopus databases that examined the associations between QoL and sleep quality in older adults. Our systematic literature search identified 23 studies concerning a total of 21,092 participants (range of mean ages: 58-79 years). The results showed that self-reported sleep quality, but not objective sleep quality, correlated positively with QoL with a moderate effect size (for self-reported sleep quality, the overall estimate of the average effect size was a Pearson's r  = .28 [95% CI: .34, .23]; for objective sleep quality, it was r  = .01 [.12, -.09]). This also applied to the main domains of QoL concerning physical and psychological health, social relationships and environmental aspects (the estimated average effect sizes ranged from Pearson's r  = .13 to r  = .35). These findings highlight the influence of sleep quality, and particularly of self-reported sleep quality, on QoL (as a whole and in its specific domains) in older adults with normal aging and no insomnia. This influence should therefore be investigated systematically when examining QoL.

Individual factors can play a relevant role in explaining gender differences in environmental learning in terms of visuospatial abilities and beliefs about spatial abilities, such as stereotypes and growth mindset about navigation ability. In this study, we aim to investigate how mental rotation ability and spatial beliefs interact in the acquisition of egocentric and allocentric spatial knowledge. A sample of 244 participants (140 women) completed individual difference measures, including a mental rotation test (MRT) and questionnaires on gender stereotypes and growth mindsets about navigation ability. Participants then learned a specific route in a virtual environment and performed an egocentric pointing task and an allocentric pointing task. Men performed better in mental rotation and egocentric pointing tasks. Moreover, mental rotation ability predicted both egocentric and allocentric pointing performance; growth mindset predicted allocentric pointing. In general, these results suggest that, despite gender differences in some spatial measures, cognitive abilities and beliefs contribute to supporting environmental knowledge in both men and women., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023 Miola, Muffato, Pazzaglia and Meneghetti.)

We examined the roles self-efficacy plays in environmental learning in terms of self-efficacy feedback and task-specific (navigation-based) self-efficacy. We manipulated self-efficacy using positive and neutral feedback to investigate the relationship between receiving positive feedback and environmental learning performance and subsequent recall. A total of 231 participants were administered visuospatial tasks, where 117 received positive feedback, and 114 received neutral feedback. Then, we tested environmental learning using route retracing, pointing, and map-completion tasks. Before each environmental task, participants evaluated their task-specific self-efficacy. A series of spatial self-reported preferences were gathered as well. Mediation models showed that receiving positive feedback after a visuospatial task influences environmental recall performance through the mediation of task-specific self-efficacy. Moreover, after accounting for experimental manipulation and gender, we found that task-specific self-efficacy, sense of direction, and visuospatial abilities influence spatial-recall task performance, even with some differences as a function of the specific recall tasks considered. Overall, our findings suggest that among individual characteristics, task-specific self-efficacy can sustain environmental learning. Furthermore, giving positive feedback can improve spatial self-efficacy before conducting spatial-recall tasks.

Aging coincides with a decline in map learning ability, but it is unclear to what extent different aspects of the mental representation are susceptible. The present study aimed to investigate knowledge about landmarks, their positions and distances (categorical and distance relations, respectively) in relation to aging as well as cognitive functioning (measured with the Montreal Cognitive Assessment [MoCA]), visuospatial abilities, and self-reported wayfinding inclinations. Thirty young adults and 60 older adults (30 aged 63-74 and 30 aged 75-86) learned a map, freely recalled the landmarks and performed a map drawing task (considering the number of landmarks missing, position accuracy and distance accuracy). Before that, older participants were also assessed regarding their general cognitive functioning (MoCA) and a series of visuospatial measures. The results show age-related differences among adults in recalling landmarks and in both categorical and distance relations, with a worsening of performance of old-olds only in the former. Older adults' MoCA score related to accuracy in the three measures, and an additional role of spatial anxiety was found for distance accuracy. Above and beyond the age-related decline, the quality of older people's spatial mental representation is related to higher general cognitive level and lower spatial anxiety.

Background: Sleep has a crucial role in physical and mental health across the lifespan. In addition to an excessive intrusive sleep-related cognitive activity, another factor that may influence sleep quality in old age is sleep-related metacognitive activity, such as metacognitive beliefs about sleeping difficulties, and night-time thought control strategies. Here, we aimed to assess the relationship between sleep-related metacognitive beliefs, thought control strategies, excessive intrusive cognitive activities, such as dysfunctional beliefs about sleep, or objective and/or perceived sleep disruptions in elderly people., Method: Sleep-related metacognitive beliefs, thought control strategies, and dysfunctional beliefs related to sleep and perceived sleeping difficulties were assessed with several questionnaires in 50 older adults with no symptoms of dementia, depression, or insomnia. Objective measures of sleep were also collected over 7 days of actigraphic recordings., Results: Regression analyses showed that subjective sleeping difficulties were explained by sleep-related metacognitive activity, and particularly by metacognitive beliefs about sleeping difficulties. Interestingly, objective sleep measures were not associated with metacognitive activity. In addition, self-reported poor sleepers had stronger metacognitive beliefs about sleeping difficulties and a longer sleep onset latency than self-reported good sleepers., Conclusions: The present findings underscore the influence of metacognitive activity, and sleep-related metacognitive beliefs in particular, on the perception of sleeping difficulties in older adults., (© 2018 The International Association of Applied Psychology.)