Path Learning From Navigation in Aging: The Role of Cognitive Functioning and Wayfinding Inclinations

Aging coincides with a decline in navigation and wayfinding abilities, but it is unclear to what extent factors relating to a given individual may contribute to mitigating this decline. The present study aims to analyze how older adults’ objective cognitive functioning and self-reported subjective wayfinding inclinations predict their navigation performance. Sixty-four older adults were assessed on their general cognitive functioning (all scoring from 22 to 30 on the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, MoCA), visuospatial working memory (VSWM), and perspective-taking abilities. Their self-assessed wayfinding inclinations (such as their sense of direction, pleasure in exploring places, and spatial anxiety) were also examined. Then participants learned a path in an environment from video navigation and performed a route repetition task (which maintained the same egocentric perspective as the learning phase), and a sketch map task (which involved switching from an egocentric perspective used in the learning phase to an allocentric perspective). The results showed that positive wayfinding inclinations (in terms of pleasure in exploring) related to participants’ route repetition accuracy, while their general cognitive performance (MoCA scores) related to their sketch map drawing accuracy. Individual factors such as cognitive functioning and wayfinding inclinations relate differently to older people’s navigation performance, depending on the demands of the tasks used to test their environment learning.