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      Age-Related Differences in Associative Learning of Landmarks and Heading Directions in a Virtual Navigation Task

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          Abstract

          Previous studies have showed that spatial memory declines with age but have not clarified the relevance of different landmark cues for specifying heading directions among different age groups. This study examined differences between younger, middle-aged and older adults in route learning and memory tasks after they navigated a virtual maze that contained: (a) critical landmarks that were located at decision points (i.e., intersections) and (b) non-critical landmarks that were located at non-decision points (i.e., the sides of the route). Participants were given a recognition memory test for critical and non-critical landmarks and also given a landmark-direction associative learning task. Compared to younger adults, older adults committed more navigation errors during route learning and were poorer at associating the correct heading directions with both critical and non-critical landmarks. Notably, older adults exhibited a landmark-direction associative memory deficit at decision points; this was the first finding to show that an associative memory deficit exist among older adults in a navigational context for landmarks that are pertinent for reaching a goal, and suggest that older adults may expend more cognitive resources on the encoding of landmark/object features than on the binding of landmark and directional information. This study is also the first to show that older adults did not have a tendency to process non-critical landmarks, which were regarded as distractors/irrelevant cues for specifying the directions to reach the goal, to an equivalent or larger extent than younger adults. We explain this finding in view of the low number of non-critical cues in our virtual maze (relative to a real-world urban environment) that might not have evoked older adults’ usual tendency toward processing or encoding distractors. We explain the age differences in navigational and cognitive performance with regards to functional and structural changes in the hippocampus and parahippocampus, and recommend further investigations into the functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus for a better understanding of the landmark-direction associative learning among the elderly. Finally, it is hoped that the current behavioral findings will facilitate efforts to identify the neural markers of Alzheimer’s disease, a disease that commonly involves navigational deficits.

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          Most cited references67

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          Aging cognition: from neuromodulation to representation.

          Basic cognitive functions, such as the abilities to activate, represent, maintain, focus and process information, decline with age. A paradigm shift towards cross-level conceptions is needed in order to obtain an integrative understanding of cognitive aging phenomena that cuts across neural, information-processing, and behavioral levels. We review empirical data at these different levels, and computational theories proposed to enable their integration. A theoretical link is highlighted, relating deficient neuromodulation with noisy information processing, which might result in less distinctive cortical representations. These less distinctive representations might be implicated in working memory and attentional functions that underlie the behavioral manifestations of cognitive aging deficits.
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            Adult age differences in memory performance: tests of an associative deficit hypothesis.

            An associative hypothesis to explain and predict older adults' deficient explicit episodic memory performance was outlined and tested. The hypothesis attributes a substantial part of older adults' deficient memory performance to their difficulty in merging unrelated attributes-units of an episode into a cohesive unit. Although each of the components can be memorized to a reasonable degree, the associations that tie the attributes-units to each other grow weaker in old age. Four experiments are reported that provide (a) a converging validity to the hypothesis by demonstrating this associative deficit for both interitem relationships and intraitem relationships and (b) a discriminant validity to the hypothesis by contrasting and testing competing predictions made by the associative hypothesis and by alternative hypotheses. The implications of these results to older adults' episodic memory performance are discussed.
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              Development of a self-report measure of environmental spatial ability

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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Journal
                Front Aging Neurosci
                Front Aging Neurosci
                Front. Aging Neurosci.
                Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience
                Frontiers Media S.A.
                1663-4365
                27 May 2016
                2016
                : 8
                : 122
                Affiliations
                School of Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology Atlanta, GA, USA
                Author notes

                Edited by: Ronald Cohen, University of Florida, USA

                Reviewed by: Vidyaramanan Ganesan, Rowan University, USA; Umesh Gangishetti, Emory University, USA

                *Correspondence: Scott D. Moffat, scott.moffat@ 123456psych.gatech.edu
                Article
                10.3389/fnagi.2016.00122
                4882336
                27303290
                780ddce2-c5a4-4980-86cc-7be5e4a4138a
                Copyright © 2016 Zhong and Moffat.

                This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

                History
                : 21 March 2016
                : 12 May 2016
                Page count
                Figures: 6, Tables: 2, Equations: 0, References: 81, Pages: 11, Words: 0
                Categories
                Neuroscience
                Original Research

                Neurosciences
                age-related differences,spatial navigation,route learning,landmark recognition,associative learning,associative memory deficit

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