Separable cognitive and motor decline tracked across adult life-span for goal-directed navigation

Spatial navigation is a fundamental cognitive skill, yet our understanding of the strategies people employ in real-world navigation remains incomplete. By using a combination of behavioral and computational modeling approaches, we investigated navigation strategies - and their decline with age - in the Sea Hero Quest (SHQ) game, where participants controlled a boat to reach a series of goal locations, within different maps. We report three findings: First, participants favor goal-directed strategies over visibility-based strategies. Second, participants show signatures of sequential planning, both during memorization and navigation, as they show primacy effects. Third, our results show a significant age-related decline in navigation performance, which depends both on reduced motor skill and decreased cognitive strategy. Unexpectedly, the latter is not associated with a shift to visibility-based strategy or to an incorrect sequencing of goals. The models developed offer a framework for analyzing navigation and its links to neurodegenerative diseases in virtual environments.