Abstract
Ageing effects on spatial navigation are characterized mainly in terms of impaired allocentric strategies. However, an alternative hypothesis is that navigation difficulties in aged people are associated with deficits in processing and encoding spatial cues. We tested this hypothesis by studying how geometry and landmark cues control navigation in young and older adults in a real, ecological environment. Recordings of body and gaze dynamics revealed a preference for geometry-based navigation in older adults, and for landmark-based navigation in younger ones. While cue processing was associated with specific fixation patterns, advanced age manifested itself in a longer reorientation time, reflecting an unbalanced exploration–exploitation trade-off in scanning policies. Moreover, a battery of tests revealed a specific cognitive deficit in older adults with geometric preference. These results suggest that allocentric strategy deficits in ageing can result from difficulties related to landmark coding, and predict recovery of allocentric strategies in geometrically polarized environments.
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Data availability
The datasets generated and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon request.
Code availability
All custom software can be found at http://www.aging-vision-action.fr/ava_files/silversight/custom.software.zip.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by ANR—Essilor SilverSight Chair No. ANR-14-CHIN-0001. The funders had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We thank S. Mohand-Said of the Clinical Investigation Centre of the Quinze-Vingts Hospital, Paris, for medical supervision during clinical screening of participants. We also thank K. Lagrené and A.-R. Bourefis, from the Aging in Vision and Action laboratory at Vision Institute, for helping in enrolling/profiling the participants and for assistance in performing the experiments, respectively. Finally, the authors wish to thank E. Gutman, J. Lebrun and C. Authié of the Streetlab team for technical support in setting up the experiments in the Streetlab platform.
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M.B., D.S., L.L.B., J.-A.S. and A.A. designed the experiment. M.B., G.T., C.P.A. and L.L.B. collected and analysed the data. M.B., D.S., C.P.A., J.-A.S. and A.A. wrote the article.
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Supplementary Video 1
Streetlab platform at the Vision Institute: an ecological street-like environment used to assess navigation under fully controlled conditions. The experimental environment consisted of a rectangular enclosure (aspect ratio, 1.99) with 19 realistic panels providing real-world wall textures that fully covered the walls of the enclosure. Both whole-body and eye motion were recorded (at 120 and 60 Hz, respectively) as subjects navigated around the obstacle-free environment.
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Bécu, M., Sheynikhovich, D., Tatur, G. et al. Age-related preference for geometric spatial cues during real-world navigation. Nat Hum Behav 4, 88–99 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0718-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-019-0718-z
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