Older Adults Use Mental Representations That Reduce Cognitive Load: Mental Rotation Utilizes Holistic Representations and Processing

ABSTRACT

Thirty-two participants (16 younger adults, mean age of 18, and 16 older adults, mean age of 70) were examined to determine whether older adults adopt mental representations and processes that are less taxing on the cognitive system. Specifically, they were asked to mentally rotate a variety of images with different levels of complexity to examine whether they mentally rotate stimuli holistically or piecemeal; that is, whether they rotate the image as a single undifferentiated unit or as a collection of segments that are connected together to form the image. Using analysis of variance (ANOVA) the authors observed that younger adults found the more complex images harder to rotate, whereas the older adults rotated the complex images with the same effort as the simple images. The data reflected that older adults used holistic representations and processing in visual mental rotation. This information-processing schema reduces the use of cognitive resources as its underpinning because it is less computationally intensive. Furthermore, such a schema is more robust because it is not dependant or affected by the complexity of the image. The younger adults used piecemeal representations and processing. In contrast to the holistic strategy, the piecemeal schema is more volatile because it entails that the demands on the cognitive system vary with different images.

This research was supported by a research grant from the Nuffield Foundation. The authors also want to thank Ailsa Peron, Mirja Petri, and Romola Bucks for their comments.