Spatial knowledge of young and elderly adults: scene recognition from familiar and novel perspectives

Thirty young adults (mean age = 25.3) and 30 elderly adults (mean age = 65.3) were tested on a memory task in which they were asked to recognize environmental scenes from familiar and novel perspectives. Participants initially viewed slides of 10 business and 10 residential street intersections. Pairs of intersections were then presented and subjects were asked to select the intersection viewed previously. During the recognition phase subjects saw the intersections from the original perspective (0 degrees), rotated 90 degrees from the original perspective, or rotated 180 degrees from the original perspective. Young adults were more accurate than elderly adults and accuracy was greater for business than residential scenes at both age levels. Subjects were more accurate in the 0 than 180 degree condition, while performance in the 90 degree condition was significantly less accurate than in the other two conditions. These results indicate that (1) young adults have better recognition memory than elderly adults for real world scenes, and (2) environmental differentiation aids recognition memory for spatial locations.