INTRAPERSONAL AND EXTRAPERSONAL SPACE: PERFORMANCE OF OLDER ADULTS ON ECOLOGICALLY VALID ORIENTATION TASKS

ABSTRACT

This experiment examined performance of 20 older adults (64 to 76 years) and 20 young adults (18 to 35 years) on two orientation tasks: The Intrapersonal task required participants to point to parts of their body corresponding to those on a line drawing; and, the Extrapersonal task involved translating a route indicated on paper to walking a route on a corresponding floor map. Older adults were found to be slower at completing both tasks, although accuracy of performance was comparable between age groups. The results were interpreted in terms of a speed-accuracy tradeoff that increases with age.

This study is drawn from a thesis submitted by Mary Desrocher in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the PhD degree at the University of Toronto. Support for this research was provided by a postgraduate fellowship from the National Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and a Hospital for Sick Children RESTRACOM award to Mary Desrocher. The authors are grateful to all the participants for their interest and to Dr. Morris Moscovitch for allowing us to use the resources of the Memory Lab at the University of Toronto at Mississauga.

Notes

*The number of participants needed to increase the power to 0.80.