Adult age differences in spatial memory: Effects of structural context and practice

Abstract

We examined the effect of structural context on memory for spatial location in young and elderly women in two studies. Subjects studied and later reconstructed an array of visually identical objects that were positioned in a three-dimensional Plexiglas matrix. For half the subjects, small household objects were interspersed in the array to serve as spatial landmark cues during encoding and replacement. All subjects received two study and replacement trials. The results indicated that (a) older women remembered fewer locations than younger women but benefited more from landmark cues to location, (b) performance improved on the second replacement trial for the young but not for the older women, and (c) both age groups appeared to use similar processing strategies that were based on the vertical dimension of space. These results suggest that structural context enhances older adults' retention of three-dimensional spatial information. The implications of these data for the conceptual distinction between structural and organizational aspects of spatial context are discussed.