Department of Psychology, Ageing and Dementia Research Centre, Bournemouth University, UK; Leibniz Institute for Neurobiology, Magdeburg, Germany.
Northumbria University, UK.
Cognition. 2019 Jun;187:50-61. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.02.012. Epub 2019 Feb 28.
Our ability to learn unfamiliar routes declines in typical and atypical ageing. The reasons for this decline, however, are not well understood. Here we used eye-tracking to investigate how ageing affects people's ability to attend to navigationally relevant information and to select unique objects as landmarks. We created short routes through a virtual environment, each comprised of four intersections with two objects each, and we systematically manipulated the saliency and uniqueness of these objects. While salient objects might be easier to memorise than non-salient objects, they cannot be used as reliable landmarks if they appear more than once along the route. As cognitive ageing affects executive functions and control of attention, we hypothesised that the process of selecting navigationally relevant objects as landmarks might be affected as well. The behavioural data showed that younger participants outperformed the older participants and the eye-movement data revealed some systematic differences between age groups. Specifically, older adults spent less time looking at the unique, and therefore navigationally relevant, landmark objects. Both young and older participants, however, effectively directed gaze towards the unique and away from the non-unique objects, even if these were more salient. These findings highlight specific age-related differences in the control of attention that could contribute to declining route learning abilities in older age. Interestingly, route-learning performance in the older age group was more variable than in the young age group with some older adults showing performance similar to the young group. These individual differences in route learning performance were strongly associated with verbal and episodic memory abilities.
我们学习陌生路线的能力在正常和非正常衰老过程中都会下降。然而，这种下降的原因还不是很清楚。在这里，我们使用眼动追踪技术来研究衰老如何影响人们关注导航相关信息以及选择独特物体作为地标物的能力。我们在虚拟环境中创建了短路线，每条路线由四个交叉口组成，每个交叉口有两个物体，我们系统地操纵这些物体的显著性和独特性。虽然显著的物体可能比不显著的物体更容易记住，但如果它们在路线上多次出现，就不能作为可靠的地标物。由于认知衰老会影响执行功能和注意力控制，我们假设选择导航相关物体作为地标物的过程也会受到影响。行为数据显示，年轻参与者的表现优于年长参与者，而眼动数据则揭示了两个年龄组之间的一些系统差异。具体来说，年长的成年人在查看独特的、因此也是导航相关的地标物体上花费的时间较少。然而，无论是年轻人还是老年人，他们都有效地将目光集中在独特的物体上，而不是非独特的物体上，即使这些物体更显著。这些发现突出了与注意力控制相关的特定年龄差异，这些差异可能导致老年人路线学习能力的下降。有趣的是，年长组的路线学习表现比年轻组更具变异性，一些年长组的表现与年轻组相似。这些在路线学习表现上的个体差异与言语和情景记忆能力密切相关。
