Visual Attention, Verbal Memory and Age-Related Route Learning Impairments

Grzeschik, Conroy-Dalton, Inners, Shanker, and Wiener (2019) investigated how aging affects an individuals' capability to attent to navigational information for the selection of special objects such as landmarks. A virtual environment with different routes was created and gaze behavior was assessed with eye-tracking.

Younger and older participant groups learned different short routes. The older subjects in the study did make more errors and did need more repetition before they did learn the route successfully as compared to younger subjects. Compared to younger subjects, the older subjects were performing equally when they had to disengage from salient, but unimportant landmark cues. The performance of route learning in the older subjects was related to verbal memory and episodic memory abilities (Grzeschik et al., 2019).