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Experimental Aging Research: An International Journal Devoted to the Scientific Study of the Aging Process Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uear20
Age and sex differences in the mental realignment of maps a
Jocelyn B. Aubrey & Allen R. Dobbs
a
a
University of Alberta Published online: 28 Sep 2007.
To cite this article: Jocelyn B. Aubrey & Allen R. Dobbs (1990) Age and sex differences in the mental realignment of maps, Experimental Aging Research: An International Journal Devoted to the Scientific Study of the Aging Process, 16:3, 133-139, DOI: 10.1080/07340669008251540 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07340669008251540
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Experimenlol Aging Research, Volume 16, Number 3, 1990, ISSN 0734-0664 "1990 Beech Hill Enterprises Inc.
Age and Sex Differences in the Mental Realignment of Maps JOCELYN B. AUBREY AND ALLEN R. DOBBS
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University of Alberta
Community-residing young and elderly persons were given six maps with routes indicated by lines connecting dots. The dots were arranged in a 3 x 3 matrix that corresponded to the placement of discs affixed to the testing room floor. Route lengths increased by one segment with each subsequent map. In one condition participants were instructed not to turn the map while walking the indicated route and thus the orientation of the map to the room varied as the person followed the path. In a second condition participants turned the map while following the route, keeping it aligned with the room. Elderly persons made fewer correct choices and took more time to make direction decisions than younger people as did females compared to males. When the map could not be turned, decision times were related to the amount of misalignment between the map and the room. Elderly persons, especially females were influenced more by map misalignment than were young people. The results indicate that mental realignment is an important aspect of route following and may explain some of the difficulty older people have with such tasks.
I
n their everyday interactions with their environment, elderly people utilize smaller neighbourhood areas and are less familiar with them than are young people (Walsh, Krauss, & Regnier, 1981). This may be due, in part, to the increased difficulty in wayfinding experienced by older people. Most of the relevant research has assessed environmental knowledge and relied heavily on memory tasks to provide information about possible age differences. That research indicates that elderly persons make less accurate and efficient route plans (Kirasic & Allen, 1985), draw more disorganized and inaccurate sketch maps (Walsh et al., 1981), and recognize fewer landmarks (Ohta, 1983) than young persons. Memory for landmarks and routes is without doubt an important aspect of wayfinding. However, age-related declines in memory performance have been documented in a wide variety of tasks other than those having to do with wayfinding and orientation. The question addressed in the present research is whether there are age differences in wayfinding even when memory requirements are minimized. One way to reduce memory requirements is to provide a map depicting the route to be followed in a sparse environment that is without recognizable landmarks. In a previous study (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989), we utilized a laboratory map-following procedure in which participants followed paths outlined on hand-held maps. The maps could not be turned and thus the alignment between the map and the environment changed continuously. Ac-
curacy of direction decisions and time to complete each map was computed for each subject. We reported substantial age differences in performance accuracy and completion time. One possible explanation for the results is that the elderly people may have had difficulty with the mental geographic updating of body and map coordinates in relation to the environment (Sholl, 1988). Research with college students on the orientation specificity of route information acquired from secondary sources such as maps (Levine, Jankovic, & Palij, 1982; Presson & Hazelrigg, 1984) suggests that the mental realignment of aspects of the environment may be an important process in successful wayfinding. Two lines of research suggest that older adults might have particular difficulty with the mental realignment component of wayfinding tasks. Age-related declines in perspective-taking ability occur when adults are tested on their memory for landmarks viewed from different perspectives (Weber, Brown, & Weldon, 1978). Similar results have been reported with a task that required subjects to imagine a new perspective without reliance on memory for previously viewed perspectives (Ohta, Walsh, & Krauss, 1981). There is, as well, ample evidence of agerelated deficits in mental realignment from the study of mental rotation tasks where two- or three- dimensional line drawings are presented and the time taken to decide if one drawing is a rotation of another is measured. The
The research reported in tis article was partially supported by a grant to the first author from the Alberta Mental Health Advisory Council. Correspondence and reprint requests should be sent to Allen R. Dobbs, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9, CANADA.
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time necessary to make these judgements is a direct function of the angular difference between the patterns (Cooper & Shepard, 1973) and elderly persons are considerably slower than young people and make more errors (Berg, Hertzog, & Hunt, 1982; Cerella, Poon, & Fozard, 1981; Gaylord & Marsh, 1975; Puglisi & Morrell, 1986). In the present study, participants were given a series of maps, each showing a route that consisted of several segments. The person was required to maintain the map in a constant orientation to his or her body. This resulted in identifiable misalignments between the map and the environment. The maps were designed such that at different choice points there were misalignments of 0" to 180" in steps of 45 degrees. At each choice point, the person was to make a decision about the turn necessary to reach the next destination and this decision was to be made prior to beginning the walk to that point. Monitoring the amount of time that the person remained at each destination thus provided a measure of decision time. If mental realignment is an important aspect of wayfinding, then these decision times should increase with increasingly large misalignments between the map and the environment. We expected that the time to make decisions would be influenced by the amount of misalignment between the map and the room and that older people would take longer for decisions when there were larger angular disparities between the room and map orientation. In order to provide further confirmation that mental realignment is a relevant aspect of route following, a second condition was added in which the participants physically rotated the maps while following the routes, thus maintaining the environment-map alignment throughout the task. Although sex differences have been reported on paper and pencil assessments of spatial ability for young (McGee, 1979) and older (Schaie & Strother, 1968) adults, they have not been found for assessments of cognitive maps (Evans, 1980) or memory for landmarks (Ohta, 1981). When sex differences have been examined in tests of mental rotation with older subjects, results favoured males in two studies (Berg et al., 1982; Cerella et al., 1981), but in another study (Puglisi & Morrell, 1986) no differences were found. Because of the inconsistencies in the literature, it seemed important to test for possible sex differences in the present study. Method Subjects Sixty-four volunteers recruited through local service clubs and senior citizen groups comprised two age groups of 29-41 years (M= 35.3) and 59-77 years (M = 67.8) with an equal number of males and females in each group. Education and WAIS Vocabulary scores of the two groups were analyzed separately in 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) analyses of variance. Education level did not differ reliably for either the age variable (Young M = 15.1; Elderly M = 13.7) or the sex variable (Females M = 13.7; Males M = 15.0), largest F (1,60) = 3.92, p > .05. For the
WAIS Vocabulary scores, neither the effect of age (Young = 62.9; Elderly M = 63.6) nor sex (Females M = 63.6; Males M = 62.8) was reliable, largest F (1,.59) = .1 14, p > .05, The Age x Sex interaction was not reliable in either analysis. All participants were communityresiding and were in good physical health as measured on a self-report questionnaire (0 = excellent health, 4 = poor health). A 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) ANOVA on this rating indicated no differences among groups (Mean ratings: Young females = 0.75; young males = 0.69; older females = 0.69; older males = 0.50). Participanrs had no known history of head trauma within the previous five years, and reported no neurological or psychiatric disorders. With the exception of four elderly persons with 20/50 vision, all participants had corrected bilateral vision of 20/25 or better as assessed with the Snellen Eye Chart. The visual acuity of all participants was deemed adequate for the large map stimuli used in this study.
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Materials Three practice and six test maps were designed which were similar to those used in previous research (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989; Ratcliff & Newcombe, 1973). The number of turns on the test maps increased sequentially from 6 on Map 1 to 11 on Map 6. Over the six maps, there were 25 right and 26 left turns. The maps are illustrated in Figure 1. Maps were drawn on 30 cm square white cardboard sheets with the paths and location dots drawn in heavy black ink. Starting points were indicated by a circle and the endings by an arrowhead. Care was taken in the preparation of the maps to minimize confusion with the lines when a dot was included more than once on a route. North was marked on each of the maps and participants were informed that the experimenter was !itanding in front of the north wall of the room. Nine 15 cm red disks were glued to the floor approximately 1.50cm apart in a 3 x 3 arrangement. The walls of the bare experimental room were covered by plain, untextureld curtains to minimize external cues.
Conditions In the No Map Turn condition participants were required to hold each map with the north side farthest from their bodies throughout the trial and instructed not to turn the map in any way or attempt to realign their bodies with north. Consequently, although the map was in a constant orientation relative to the individuals, its orientation to the room varied as they walked the route. In the Map Turn condition participants were required to turn the maps throughout the trial, keeping the north edge of the map in a constant orientation to the north wall of the room. Earlier research (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989) had indicated that differential decline in performance between young and elderly participants became evident with Map 4. Therefore, two map orderings were devised, Maps 1-6 in sequential order, and Map order 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3. All
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P1
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NORTH
NORTH
Map 1
NORTH
z P3
NORTH
Map 2
NORTH
Map 4
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FIGURE 1. Practice and test maps used in this study. Starting dots are circled and end dots are indicated by an arrowhead.
maps for one condition (e.g., No Map Turn) were presented on one day. The remaining condition was tested on a subsequent day. Over the two days, condition and map order were counterbalanced across participants, such that only one male and one female in each group had the same ordering of day, condition and map sequence. Map order was found to have no influence on performance. Because of this, data were collapsed across map order for all analyses.
Procedure The maps were given to the participants on the starting dot of each route while they faced north. Instructions emphasized accuracy over speed and required the participants to walk directly forward, not backward or sideways. After instructions were given, the map was uncovered and the test began. Participants were given feed-
back and allowed to make corrections while following the three practice maps which preceded test maps. Feedback was not given on test maps. On test maps, if a participant discovered, after reaching a location dot, that an error had been made, he or she was allowed to return to the previous dot and try again. If this happened more than twice on the same dot, the test was to be terminated and a new map begun. In actual fact, no maps were terminated for this reason. The experimenter drew tracings of the actual routes taken by each participant and recorded times on a Hewlitt-Packard 41-C electronic calculator equipped with a stopwatch module that enabled storage of the sequence of time measures for subsequent recording. A video camera was installed on the ceiling to record each person’s performance. This allowed timing and accuracy of route drawings to be rechecked. The time spent on each dot was recorded in order to give a measure of decision time. Timing for decision-making began the
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MISALIGNMENT WITH NORTH
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FIGURE 2. Decision times for five degrees of misalign-
ment with the north wall of t h e room for men and women in each age group.
moment the participant stepped on a dot and ended as soon as he or she stepped off. Instructions for the two map-following conditions emphasized that participants were not be begin moving to the next location until the direction choice had been completed. Nevertheless, the walking time between dots was recorded because some of that time might have been used for direction choices, checking accuracy of decisions, etc.
Results The data were analyzed with the statistical package for microcomputers, Systat, Version 3.1. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) for repeated measures using multivariate techniques were carried out in all cases. The mean time (in seconds) spent on each dot was computed for males and females within each age group. Only dot times that resulted in correct direction choices were included in the time analysis. Any times exceeding twice the group mean were deleted; this amounted to 6.7% of the dot times. No systematic relationships were found between the deleted scores and the variables under investigation. There were more extreme times deleted from the data of the older group, which is consistent with the greater variability frequently reported for older versus younger persons in research on aging. Whenever there were missing data for any particular participant, the average time on that item for all participants within the appropriate sex and age grouping was substituted. Time spent on the first dot of each map appeared to have been used by most participants for orienting to the map as well as for making a decision for the first direction and was therefore not included in the following analysis. In order to assess the mental realignment requirements in the No Map Turn condition, decision time was related to the number of degrees that the map was misaligned with the north wall at the time the decision was made, called North Misalignment time. Five North Misalignment categories of O", 45", 90",135", and 180" were calculated by averaging, across the six maps, all dot times
that fit into each category. A 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) x 5 (Degrees of Misalignment) ANOVA was computed on the North Misalignment time data of the No Map Turn coni 2 illustrates the interaction among age, sex and dition. F degree which was marginally significant. Wilks' Lambda = .857, F(4,57) = 2.37, p < .06. Tukey's WSD analysis (alpha = .01) indicated that at 135" and 180" elderly women differed reliably from all others and at 0" and 90" they differed from all but the older men. The Age x Degree interaction was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .662,F(4,57) = 7.26,p< ,001. The Age x Sex,F'(1,60) = 4.59, p < .04,and Sex x Degree, Wilks' Lambda = .672, F(4,57) = 6.94, p < .001, interactions were reliable due to the extreme times of the elderly women. Elderly persons (M = 2.58 seconds) took more time than young people(M = 1.33), F(1,60) = 44.22,p< .001. Females (M = 2.25) had longer decision than males (A4 = 1.67), F (1,60) = 17.91, p < .001. The main effect of degree was also reliable, Wilks' Lambda = ,172, F (437) = 68.79, p < .001. Mean times from 0" to 180" were 1.37, 1.34, 1.63, 2.41, 2.83, respectively. Time taken to walk the various segments between dots should have been similar for each participant if, in fact, all the decision making took place while the participant was standing on the dot. If some of the decision making, decision checking, etc., took place while walking between dots, the segment times should show the same patterns as the dot times. To assess this possibility, North Segment times were calculated in the same way as the North Misalignment decision times. For example, the 45" North Segment time measure was an average of those segments that followed each of the dots comprising the 45" North Misalignment decision time measure. The segment following a turn was chosen because it was assumed that participants may have continued to check the accuracy of a decision while walking away from a location dot. Extreme scores were deleted in the same manner as dot times with .01Vo deleted in the No Map Turn segment time condition. The North Segment analysis indicated that older people (M = 1.84) took longer to walk the segments than younger people (M = 1.41), F(1,59) = 31.05,p.< .001 and degree of map misalignment had a Significant influence, Wilks' Lambda = .307, F (4,56) = 31.58, p < .001. (MsfromO" to 180" = 1.67, 1.56, 1.71, 1.65, 1.84, respectively). It appears that participants were following the instruction to make decisions only while stopped at location dots because the monotonic relationship between time and degree of map misalignment found with the decision time analysis did not occur in the segment time analysis. Another analysis was undertaken to assess the accuracy of decision making. Each of the dots on the six test maps represented a direction decision. Once a direction error occurred on a route, the accuracy of subsequent decisions could not be determined with certainty. The number of correct direction choices to the first error was calculated and analyzed in a 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) x 2 (Condition) x 6 (Map) ANOVA with condition and map as withinsubject variables. A statistically reliable main effect of
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TABLE 1
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Corrrelations Among Time, Segments to First Error and Demographic Variables for Young and Elderly Subjects
Young Education WAIS Vocabulary Health Rating Segs Map 1 Segs Map 2 Segs Map 3 Segs Map 4 Segs Map 5 Segs Map 6 Elderly Education WAIS Vocabulary Health Rating Segs Map 1 Segs Map 2 Segs Map 3 Segs Map 4 Segs Map 5 Segs Map 6
Time 0"
Time 45"
Time 90"
Time 135"
Time 180"
Years Educ.
WAIS Vocab.
Health Rating
-.179 -.202 .238 -.077 -.333 - .508** -.369* -.133 -.146
-.035 -.188 .165 -.166 -.066 - .415* -.310 -.148 - .250
- .162
- .286 ,268 - .197 - .356* - .435* - .296 - .240 - .027
.010 -.247 .328 -.037 - .024 - .351* - .068 -.127 -.351*
-.179 -.071 .047 -.296 .135 - .517** - .460** -.181 -.324
1 .Ooo .258 - .046 - .133 .155 .096 - .212 - .lo2 .160
.258 1.Ooo - .258 -.068 .069 .034 .093 .175 .138
-.046 -.258 1 .Ooo -.027 .032 ,061 -.095
-.215 -.270 .016 -.169 -.306 - .509** -.355* -.134 -.150
-.155 -.142 .046 - .289 -.120 - .421* -.276 -.154 -.273
- .283 - .206 .014 - .199 - .276 - .427* - .303 - .235 - .008
-.181 .001 - .099 - .398* .063 - .330 -.099 -.115 -.287
-.145 -.209 .038 - .413* -.lo3 - .505** -.326 -.187 -.399*
1 .OOo
-.068 1 .Ooo .315 -.173 .390* .096 .199 -.229 -.327
-.181 .315 1 .Ooo -.051 .086 .134 -.159 -.218 -.200
- .068 - ,181
- .313 .133 .166 .160 .318 .086
.045 .040
Nore: Segs = Segments to first error; *p < .05; * p < .01.
age resulted with young persons (M = 7.89)making more correct choices prior to an error than elderly persons (M = 6.86,F (1,60)= 18.38,p < .001. Males (M = 7.68) made more correct decisions to first error than females (M = 7.06), F(1,60)= 9.98,p < .003. Condition exerted a reliable influence, such that participants made more correct choices before an error in the Map Turn condition (M = 8.10) than in the No Map Turn condition (M = 6.73), F (1,60)= 71.99,p < .001.The Map effect was also reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .094,F(5,56) = 107.78, p < .001, although this is of little interest because the maximum number of decisions increased from Map 1 to Map 6.The Age x Map interaction was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .697,F (5,56)= 4.86,p < .002.Means for Maps 1-6 respectively were: Young - 5.82,6.53,7.41, 8.34, 9.09,10.14;Elderly - 5.44,6.11,7.03,7.50,7.45,8.09. Analysis of the simple main effects indicated that elderly persons made significantly fewer correct choices to first error than young people on Map 4,F (l,60)= 5.58,p < .03;Map 5, F (1,60)= 18.59,p < .001 and Map 6, F ( 1,60)= 14.86,p < .001.The interaction between condition and map was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = S59,F (5,56)= 8.83,p < .001.The pattern of this interaction was such that when participants turned the map to keep it aligned with the room, near-ceiling performance was reached on all but the last two maps, whereas performance declined with increasing route length in the No Map
Turn condition. Analysis of the simple main effects indicated that the No Map Turn condition resulted in significantly fewer correct decisions prior to an error on all maps, smallest F (1,60)= 10.14,p < .003. Correlations among the time and accuracy measures for each age group are presented in Table 1.Overall, the relationships among the accuracy and time measures are consistently negative, suggesting that taking extra time does not necessarily ensure improved accuracy. Table 1 also provides correlations between the performance measures and the demographic variables of years of education, WAIS Vocabulary and self-reported health status. These correlations are, with one exception, nonsignificant.
Discussion On the map-following task used in this study, direction decision times were influenced by the angular disparity between the map and the room. Elderly persons, especially females, were influenced more by this than young people. Elderly persons made fewer correct direction choices prior to an error, particularly on longer routes, and all groups performed more accurately when the maps could be physically rotated such that the orientation of the map and the room remained constant. Females performed more poorly on all measures compared to males.
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The results of the analysis of North Misalignment times support other research (Levine, Marchon, & Hanley, 1984), indicating that when people try to follow a map that is misaligned with the environment, longer decision times and more errors result. The improved accuracy of all subjects in the Map Turn condition reinforces the evidence provided by the time analysis which indicated that map misalignment strongly influenced decision making. The age effects represented in the North Misalignment time data are similar to those reported by researchers assessing mental rotation abilities (Berg et al., 1982; Cerella et al., 1981;Gaylord & Marsh, 1975;Puglisi & Morrell, 1986). Elderly persons consistently took more time to make decisions than young people and larger angular disparities gave older people more difficulty. These results indicate that there may be similarities in processing between traditional mental rotation tasks and the mental realignment of a map with its environment during a wayfinding task. However, the time taken to make decisions on this task was measured in seconds compared to the milliseconds characteristic of decision times in the traditional mental rotation task. In the present task, the individual probably was performing fairly extensive calculations that involved more than a mental rotation of the physical map. While stopped at a location dot, the person had to hold in memory the current location and direction of the path leading to it, mentally update the positions of self and map with the environment in order to make the correct right-left and angle-of-turn decision, and select the correct line to follow when more than one path converged on the dot. The error rates that characterized the performance of the older group indicated that even when accuracy is stressed over speed, older adults are less accurate than young people. The participants in this study did not appear to be making the speed-accuracytrade-offs that are claimed to explain the error rate differences in traditional mental rotation studies (Jacewicz & Hartley, 1987). The analysis of number of correct decisions to first error in which older people were less accurate on the latter three maps suggests that the complexity of the stimuli or route length may be relevant factors in this regard. The finding that women did more poorly on this task is congruent with the male-female differences in spatial and mental rotation abilities reported elsewhere in the literature (Berg et al., 1982;Cerella et al., 1981;McGee, 1979;Schaie & Strother, 1968;Tapley & Bryden, 1977). It is important to note, however, that the sex differences were due primarily to the poor performance of the older women. The explanation for the differential performance of elderly females is not readily apparent. Superficially, it is easy to suggest that aging exacerbates the sex differences that have been demonstrated in numerous tests of spatial performance. If this were the case, however, older women should not show the beneficial effects of practice and training reported in previous research on spatial performance (Willis & Schaie, 1986). Such results suggest that the differences are, in part, due to experience. Some of the older women in the present study commented
that they did not drive or, as passengers, help navigate, and claimed that difficulty with the map-following task was due to this inexperience. Young women of today are more likely to drive than are older women and they tend to be involved in a wider range of careers and activities that include more extensive experience with spatial tasks. Thus, the present results may be due to experiential factors specific to the older cohort. Other research has indicated that college students.who report a poor sense of direction make more direction judgement errors than those with a good sense of tiirection, particularly when the judgement requires a mental realignment between self and environment (Kozlowski & Bryant, 1977;Sholl, 1988). The participants in the present study were asked to rate their perceived sense of direction on a five-point scale with 1 indicating a good sense of direction and 5 indicating a poor sense of tlirection. Older adults rated their sense of direction as poorer than young people, F(1,60) = 15.2,p < .001,but there were no sex differences on this question. Correlations between this rating and the number of correct decisions to first error were negative, although not statistically significant, indicating a trend for those with a poor sense of direction to be less accurate. All of the time measures relating to map misalignment correlated significantly with the rating of sense of direction (r = .27,p < .05to r = .47,p < .Ol), suggesting that those people with a poor sense of direction take longer to make direction decisions. The present findings have some important implications for understanding age-related difficulties in orientation. In a real world map-following situation both young and elderly people are likely to have success if they turn the map while following the route. In contrast, most people, particularly those who are elderly, are more likely to have difficulty when the map is not or cannot be turned, as in the case of stationary you-are-here maps. You-are-here maps frequently are inappropriately located and/or misaligned with the surrounding environment (Levine et al., 1984). With such maps, once the appropriate mental transformations have been effected, the route must be kept in memory after the person leaves the map. This requirement further compounds the difficulty for older adults. The present results suggest that older people, especially older women, might find the use of misaligned you-are-here maps particularly difficult. The results of the present research provide evidence that mental realignment is an important component of active wayfinding and that the difficulties older people have with such tasks may be due, in part, to this component. Further research is necessary to assess the influence of variations in map complexity and route length on the efficiency of route completion. As well, the relationship between traditional mental rotation tasks and wayfinding tasks that require mental realignment needs to be investigated.
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L.P. Acredolo (Eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application (pp. 105-124). New York: Plenum Press. Ohta, R.J., Walsh, D.A., & Krauss, I.K. (1981). Spatial perspective-taking in young and elderly adults. Experimental Aging Research, 7, 45-63. Presson, C.C., & Hazelrigg, M.D. (1984). Building spatial representations through primary and secondary learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 10, 716-722. Puglisi, J.T., & Morrell, R.W. (1986). Age-related slowing in mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Experimental Aging Research, 12, 217-220. Ratcliff, G., & Newcombe, F. (1973). Spatial orientation in man: Effects of left, right, and bilateral posterior cerebral lesions. Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry, 36, 448-454. Schaie, K.W., & Strother, C.R. (1968). Cognitive variables in older college graduates. In G.A. Talland (Ed.), Human aging and behavior (pp. 281-307). New York: Academic Press. Sholl, M.J. (1988). The relation between sense of direction and mental geographic updating. Intelligence, 12, 299-314.
Tapley, S.M., & Bryden, M.P. (1977). An investigation of sex-differences in spatial ability: Mental rotation of three dimensional objects. Canadian Journal of Psychology, 31, 122- 130. Walsh, D.A., Krauss, I.K., & Regnier, V.A. (1981). Spatial ability, environmental knowledge, and environmental use: The elderly. In L. Liben, A. Patterson, & N. Newcombe (Eds.), Spatial representation and behavior across the life span (pp. 321-357). New York: Academic Press. Weber, R.J., Brown, L.T., & Weldon, J.K. (1978). Cognitive maps of environmental knowledge and preference in nursing home patients. Experimental Aging Research, 4, 157-174. Willis, S.L., & Schaie, K.W. (1986). Training theelderly on the ability factors of spatial orientation and inductive reasoning. Psychology and Aging, I , 239-247.
Experimental Aging Research: An International Journal Devoted to the Scientific Study of the Aging Process Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/uear20
Age and sex differences in the mental realignment of maps a
Jocelyn B. Aubrey & Allen R. Dobbs
a
a
University of Alberta Published online: 28 Sep 2007.
To cite this article: Jocelyn B. Aubrey & Allen R. Dobbs (1990) Age and sex differences in the mental realignment of maps, Experimental Aging Research: An International Journal Devoted to the Scientific Study of the Aging Process, 16:3, 133-139, DOI: 10.1080/07340669008251540 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07340669008251540
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Experimenlol Aging Research, Volume 16, Number 3, 1990, ISSN 0734-0664 "1990 Beech Hill Enterprises Inc.
Age and Sex Differences in the Mental Realignment of Maps JOCELYN B. AUBREY AND ALLEN R. DOBBS
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University of Alberta
Community-residing young and elderly persons were given six maps with routes indicated by lines connecting dots. The dots were arranged in a 3 x 3 matrix that corresponded to the placement of discs affixed to the testing room floor. Route lengths increased by one segment with each subsequent map. In one condition participants were instructed not to turn the map while walking the indicated route and thus the orientation of the map to the room varied as the person followed the path. In a second condition participants turned the map while following the route, keeping it aligned with the room. Elderly persons made fewer correct choices and took more time to make direction decisions than younger people as did females compared to males. When the map could not be turned, decision times were related to the amount of misalignment between the map and the room. Elderly persons, especially females were influenced more by map misalignment than were young people. The results indicate that mental realignment is an important aspect of route following and may explain some of the difficulty older people have with such tasks.
I
n their everyday interactions with their environment, elderly people utilize smaller neighbourhood areas and are less familiar with them than are young people (Walsh, Krauss, & Regnier, 1981). This may be due, in part, to the increased difficulty in wayfinding experienced by older people. Most of the relevant research has assessed environmental knowledge and relied heavily on memory tasks to provide information about possible age differences. That research indicates that elderly persons make less accurate and efficient route plans (Kirasic & Allen, 1985), draw more disorganized and inaccurate sketch maps (Walsh et al., 1981), and recognize fewer landmarks (Ohta, 1983) than young persons. Memory for landmarks and routes is without doubt an important aspect of wayfinding. However, age-related declines in memory performance have been documented in a wide variety of tasks other than those having to do with wayfinding and orientation. The question addressed in the present research is whether there are age differences in wayfinding even when memory requirements are minimized. One way to reduce memory requirements is to provide a map depicting the route to be followed in a sparse environment that is without recognizable landmarks. In a previous study (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989), we utilized a laboratory map-following procedure in which participants followed paths outlined on hand-held maps. The maps could not be turned and thus the alignment between the map and the environment changed continuously. Ac-
curacy of direction decisions and time to complete each map was computed for each subject. We reported substantial age differences in performance accuracy and completion time. One possible explanation for the results is that the elderly people may have had difficulty with the mental geographic updating of body and map coordinates in relation to the environment (Sholl, 1988). Research with college students on the orientation specificity of route information acquired from secondary sources such as maps (Levine, Jankovic, & Palij, 1982; Presson & Hazelrigg, 1984) suggests that the mental realignment of aspects of the environment may be an important process in successful wayfinding. Two lines of research suggest that older adults might have particular difficulty with the mental realignment component of wayfinding tasks. Age-related declines in perspective-taking ability occur when adults are tested on their memory for landmarks viewed from different perspectives (Weber, Brown, & Weldon, 1978). Similar results have been reported with a task that required subjects to imagine a new perspective without reliance on memory for previously viewed perspectives (Ohta, Walsh, & Krauss, 1981). There is, as well, ample evidence of agerelated deficits in mental realignment from the study of mental rotation tasks where two- or three- dimensional line drawings are presented and the time taken to decide if one drawing is a rotation of another is measured. The
The research reported in tis article was partially supported by a grant to the first author from the Alberta Mental Health Advisory Council. Correspondence and reprint requests should be sent to Allen R. Dobbs, Department of Psychology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta T6G 2E9, CANADA.
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time necessary to make these judgements is a direct function of the angular difference between the patterns (Cooper & Shepard, 1973) and elderly persons are considerably slower than young people and make more errors (Berg, Hertzog, & Hunt, 1982; Cerella, Poon, & Fozard, 1981; Gaylord & Marsh, 1975; Puglisi & Morrell, 1986). In the present study, participants were given a series of maps, each showing a route that consisted of several segments. The person was required to maintain the map in a constant orientation to his or her body. This resulted in identifiable misalignments between the map and the environment. The maps were designed such that at different choice points there were misalignments of 0" to 180" in steps of 45 degrees. At each choice point, the person was to make a decision about the turn necessary to reach the next destination and this decision was to be made prior to beginning the walk to that point. Monitoring the amount of time that the person remained at each destination thus provided a measure of decision time. If mental realignment is an important aspect of wayfinding, then these decision times should increase with increasingly large misalignments between the map and the environment. We expected that the time to make decisions would be influenced by the amount of misalignment between the map and the room and that older people would take longer for decisions when there were larger angular disparities between the room and map orientation. In order to provide further confirmation that mental realignment is a relevant aspect of route following, a second condition was added in which the participants physically rotated the maps while following the routes, thus maintaining the environment-map alignment throughout the task. Although sex differences have been reported on paper and pencil assessments of spatial ability for young (McGee, 1979) and older (Schaie & Strother, 1968) adults, they have not been found for assessments of cognitive maps (Evans, 1980) or memory for landmarks (Ohta, 1981). When sex differences have been examined in tests of mental rotation with older subjects, results favoured males in two studies (Berg et al., 1982; Cerella et al., 1981), but in another study (Puglisi & Morrell, 1986) no differences were found. Because of the inconsistencies in the literature, it seemed important to test for possible sex differences in the present study. Method Subjects Sixty-four volunteers recruited through local service clubs and senior citizen groups comprised two age groups of 29-41 years (M= 35.3) and 59-77 years (M = 67.8) with an equal number of males and females in each group. Education and WAIS Vocabulary scores of the two groups were analyzed separately in 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) analyses of variance. Education level did not differ reliably for either the age variable (Young M = 15.1; Elderly M = 13.7) or the sex variable (Females M = 13.7; Males M = 15.0), largest F (1,60) = 3.92, p > .05. For the
WAIS Vocabulary scores, neither the effect of age (Young = 62.9; Elderly M = 63.6) nor sex (Females M = 63.6; Males M = 62.8) was reliable, largest F (1,.59) = .1 14, p > .05, The Age x Sex interaction was not reliable in either analysis. All participants were communityresiding and were in good physical health as measured on a self-report questionnaire (0 = excellent health, 4 = poor health). A 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) ANOVA on this rating indicated no differences among groups (Mean ratings: Young females = 0.75; young males = 0.69; older females = 0.69; older males = 0.50). Participanrs had no known history of head trauma within the previous five years, and reported no neurological or psychiatric disorders. With the exception of four elderly persons with 20/50 vision, all participants had corrected bilateral vision of 20/25 or better as assessed with the Snellen Eye Chart. The visual acuity of all participants was deemed adequate for the large map stimuli used in this study.
M
Materials Three practice and six test maps were designed which were similar to those used in previous research (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989; Ratcliff & Newcombe, 1973). The number of turns on the test maps increased sequentially from 6 on Map 1 to 11 on Map 6. Over the six maps, there were 25 right and 26 left turns. The maps are illustrated in Figure 1. Maps were drawn on 30 cm square white cardboard sheets with the paths and location dots drawn in heavy black ink. Starting points were indicated by a circle and the endings by an arrowhead. Care was taken in the preparation of the maps to minimize confusion with the lines when a dot was included more than once on a route. North was marked on each of the maps and participants were informed that the experimenter was !itanding in front of the north wall of the room. Nine 15 cm red disks were glued to the floor approximately 1.50cm apart in a 3 x 3 arrangement. The walls of the bare experimental room were covered by plain, untextureld curtains to minimize external cues.
Conditions In the No Map Turn condition participants were required to hold each map with the north side farthest from their bodies throughout the trial and instructed not to turn the map in any way or attempt to realign their bodies with north. Consequently, although the map was in a constant orientation relative to the individuals, its orientation to the room varied as they walked the route. In the Map Turn condition participants were required to turn the maps throughout the trial, keeping the north edge of the map in a constant orientation to the north wall of the room. Earlier research (Aubrey & Dobbs, 1989) had indicated that differential decline in performance between young and elderly participants became evident with Map 4. Therefore, two map orderings were devised, Maps 1-6 in sequential order, and Map order 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3. All
MENTAL REALIGNMENT OF MAPS
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~ _ _ _
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NORTH
NORTH
To
P1
P2
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NORTH
NORTH
Map 1
NORTH
z P3
NORTH
Map 2
NORTH
Map 4
Map 3
NORTH
Map 5
Map 6
FIGURE 1. Practice and test maps used in this study. Starting dots are circled and end dots are indicated by an arrowhead.
maps for one condition (e.g., No Map Turn) were presented on one day. The remaining condition was tested on a subsequent day. Over the two days, condition and map order were counterbalanced across participants, such that only one male and one female in each group had the same ordering of day, condition and map sequence. Map order was found to have no influence on performance. Because of this, data were collapsed across map order for all analyses.
Procedure The maps were given to the participants on the starting dot of each route while they faced north. Instructions emphasized accuracy over speed and required the participants to walk directly forward, not backward or sideways. After instructions were given, the map was uncovered and the test began. Participants were given feed-
back and allowed to make corrections while following the three practice maps which preceded test maps. Feedback was not given on test maps. On test maps, if a participant discovered, after reaching a location dot, that an error had been made, he or she was allowed to return to the previous dot and try again. If this happened more than twice on the same dot, the test was to be terminated and a new map begun. In actual fact, no maps were terminated for this reason. The experimenter drew tracings of the actual routes taken by each participant and recorded times on a Hewlitt-Packard 41-C electronic calculator equipped with a stopwatch module that enabled storage of the sequence of time measures for subsequent recording. A video camera was installed on the ceiling to record each person’s performance. This allowed timing and accuracy of route drawings to be rechecked. The time spent on each dot was recorded in order to give a measure of decision time. Timing for decision-making began the
136
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MISALIGNMENT WITH NORTH
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FIGURE 2. Decision times for five degrees of misalign-
ment with the north wall of t h e room for men and women in each age group.
moment the participant stepped on a dot and ended as soon as he or she stepped off. Instructions for the two map-following conditions emphasized that participants were not be begin moving to the next location until the direction choice had been completed. Nevertheless, the walking time between dots was recorded because some of that time might have been used for direction choices, checking accuracy of decisions, etc.
Results The data were analyzed with the statistical package for microcomputers, Systat, Version 3.1. Analyses of variance (ANOVA) for repeated measures using multivariate techniques were carried out in all cases. The mean time (in seconds) spent on each dot was computed for males and females within each age group. Only dot times that resulted in correct direction choices were included in the time analysis. Any times exceeding twice the group mean were deleted; this amounted to 6.7% of the dot times. No systematic relationships were found between the deleted scores and the variables under investigation. There were more extreme times deleted from the data of the older group, which is consistent with the greater variability frequently reported for older versus younger persons in research on aging. Whenever there were missing data for any particular participant, the average time on that item for all participants within the appropriate sex and age grouping was substituted. Time spent on the first dot of each map appeared to have been used by most participants for orienting to the map as well as for making a decision for the first direction and was therefore not included in the following analysis. In order to assess the mental realignment requirements in the No Map Turn condition, decision time was related to the number of degrees that the map was misaligned with the north wall at the time the decision was made, called North Misalignment time. Five North Misalignment categories of O", 45", 90",135", and 180" were calculated by averaging, across the six maps, all dot times
that fit into each category. A 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) x 5 (Degrees of Misalignment) ANOVA was computed on the North Misalignment time data of the No Map Turn coni 2 illustrates the interaction among age, sex and dition. F degree which was marginally significant. Wilks' Lambda = .857, F(4,57) = 2.37, p < .06. Tukey's WSD analysis (alpha = .01) indicated that at 135" and 180" elderly women differed reliably from all others and at 0" and 90" they differed from all but the older men. The Age x Degree interaction was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .662,F(4,57) = 7.26,p< ,001. The Age x Sex,F'(1,60) = 4.59, p < .04,and Sex x Degree, Wilks' Lambda = .672, F(4,57) = 6.94, p < .001, interactions were reliable due to the extreme times of the elderly women. Elderly persons (M = 2.58 seconds) took more time than young people(M = 1.33), F(1,60) = 44.22,p< .001. Females (M = 2.25) had longer decision than males (A4 = 1.67), F (1,60) = 17.91, p < .001. The main effect of degree was also reliable, Wilks' Lambda = ,172, F (437) = 68.79, p < .001. Mean times from 0" to 180" were 1.37, 1.34, 1.63, 2.41, 2.83, respectively. Time taken to walk the various segments between dots should have been similar for each participant if, in fact, all the decision making took place while the participant was standing on the dot. If some of the decision making, decision checking, etc., took place while walking between dots, the segment times should show the same patterns as the dot times. To assess this possibility, North Segment times were calculated in the same way as the North Misalignment decision times. For example, the 45" North Segment time measure was an average of those segments that followed each of the dots comprising the 45" North Misalignment decision time measure. The segment following a turn was chosen because it was assumed that participants may have continued to check the accuracy of a decision while walking away from a location dot. Extreme scores were deleted in the same manner as dot times with .01Vo deleted in the No Map Turn segment time condition. The North Segment analysis indicated that older people (M = 1.84) took longer to walk the segments than younger people (M = 1.41), F(1,59) = 31.05,p.< .001 and degree of map misalignment had a Significant influence, Wilks' Lambda = .307, F (4,56) = 31.58, p < .001. (MsfromO" to 180" = 1.67, 1.56, 1.71, 1.65, 1.84, respectively). It appears that participants were following the instruction to make decisions only while stopped at location dots because the monotonic relationship between time and degree of map misalignment found with the decision time analysis did not occur in the segment time analysis. Another analysis was undertaken to assess the accuracy of decision making. Each of the dots on the six test maps represented a direction decision. Once a direction error occurred on a route, the accuracy of subsequent decisions could not be determined with certainty. The number of correct direction choices to the first error was calculated and analyzed in a 2 (Age) x 2 (Sex) x 2 (Condition) x 6 (Map) ANOVA with condition and map as withinsubject variables. A statistically reliable main effect of
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TABLE 1
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Corrrelations Among Time, Segments to First Error and Demographic Variables for Young and Elderly Subjects
Young Education WAIS Vocabulary Health Rating Segs Map 1 Segs Map 2 Segs Map 3 Segs Map 4 Segs Map 5 Segs Map 6 Elderly Education WAIS Vocabulary Health Rating Segs Map 1 Segs Map 2 Segs Map 3 Segs Map 4 Segs Map 5 Segs Map 6
Time 0"
Time 45"
Time 90"
Time 135"
Time 180"
Years Educ.
WAIS Vocab.
Health Rating
-.179 -.202 .238 -.077 -.333 - .508** -.369* -.133 -.146
-.035 -.188 .165 -.166 -.066 - .415* -.310 -.148 - .250
- .162
- .286 ,268 - .197 - .356* - .435* - .296 - .240 - .027
.010 -.247 .328 -.037 - .024 - .351* - .068 -.127 -.351*
-.179 -.071 .047 -.296 .135 - .517** - .460** -.181 -.324
1 .Ooo .258 - .046 - .133 .155 .096 - .212 - .lo2 .160
.258 1.Ooo - .258 -.068 .069 .034 .093 .175 .138
-.046 -.258 1 .Ooo -.027 .032 ,061 -.095
-.215 -.270 .016 -.169 -.306 - .509** -.355* -.134 -.150
-.155 -.142 .046 - .289 -.120 - .421* -.276 -.154 -.273
- .283 - .206 .014 - .199 - .276 - .427* - .303 - .235 - .008
-.181 .001 - .099 - .398* .063 - .330 -.099 -.115 -.287
-.145 -.209 .038 - .413* -.lo3 - .505** -.326 -.187 -.399*
1 .OOo
-.068 1 .Ooo .315 -.173 .390* .096 .199 -.229 -.327
-.181 .315 1 .Ooo -.051 .086 .134 -.159 -.218 -.200
- .068 - ,181
- .313 .133 .166 .160 .318 .086
.045 .040
Nore: Segs = Segments to first error; *p < .05; * p < .01.
age resulted with young persons (M = 7.89)making more correct choices prior to an error than elderly persons (M = 6.86,F (1,60)= 18.38,p < .001. Males (M = 7.68) made more correct decisions to first error than females (M = 7.06), F(1,60)= 9.98,p < .003. Condition exerted a reliable influence, such that participants made more correct choices before an error in the Map Turn condition (M = 8.10) than in the No Map Turn condition (M = 6.73), F (1,60)= 71.99,p < .001.The Map effect was also reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .094,F(5,56) = 107.78, p < .001, although this is of little interest because the maximum number of decisions increased from Map 1 to Map 6.The Age x Map interaction was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = .697,F (5,56)= 4.86,p < .002.Means for Maps 1-6 respectively were: Young - 5.82,6.53,7.41, 8.34, 9.09,10.14;Elderly - 5.44,6.11,7.03,7.50,7.45,8.09. Analysis of the simple main effects indicated that elderly persons made significantly fewer correct choices to first error than young people on Map 4,F (l,60)= 5.58,p < .03;Map 5, F (1,60)= 18.59,p < .001 and Map 6, F ( 1,60)= 14.86,p < .001.The interaction between condition and map was reliable, Wilks' Lambda = S59,F (5,56)= 8.83,p < .001.The pattern of this interaction was such that when participants turned the map to keep it aligned with the room, near-ceiling performance was reached on all but the last two maps, whereas performance declined with increasing route length in the No Map
Turn condition. Analysis of the simple main effects indicated that the No Map Turn condition resulted in significantly fewer correct decisions prior to an error on all maps, smallest F (1,60)= 10.14,p < .003. Correlations among the time and accuracy measures for each age group are presented in Table 1.Overall, the relationships among the accuracy and time measures are consistently negative, suggesting that taking extra time does not necessarily ensure improved accuracy. Table 1 also provides correlations between the performance measures and the demographic variables of years of education, WAIS Vocabulary and self-reported health status. These correlations are, with one exception, nonsignificant.
Discussion On the map-following task used in this study, direction decision times were influenced by the angular disparity between the map and the room. Elderly persons, especially females, were influenced more by this than young people. Elderly persons made fewer correct direction choices prior to an error, particularly on longer routes, and all groups performed more accurately when the maps could be physically rotated such that the orientation of the map and the room remained constant. Females performed more poorly on all measures compared to males.
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The results of the analysis of North Misalignment times support other research (Levine, Marchon, & Hanley, 1984), indicating that when people try to follow a map that is misaligned with the environment, longer decision times and more errors result. The improved accuracy of all subjects in the Map Turn condition reinforces the evidence provided by the time analysis which indicated that map misalignment strongly influenced decision making. The age effects represented in the North Misalignment time data are similar to those reported by researchers assessing mental rotation abilities (Berg et al., 1982; Cerella et al., 1981;Gaylord & Marsh, 1975;Puglisi & Morrell, 1986). Elderly persons consistently took more time to make decisions than young people and larger angular disparities gave older people more difficulty. These results indicate that there may be similarities in processing between traditional mental rotation tasks and the mental realignment of a map with its environment during a wayfinding task. However, the time taken to make decisions on this task was measured in seconds compared to the milliseconds characteristic of decision times in the traditional mental rotation task. In the present task, the individual probably was performing fairly extensive calculations that involved more than a mental rotation of the physical map. While stopped at a location dot, the person had to hold in memory the current location and direction of the path leading to it, mentally update the positions of self and map with the environment in order to make the correct right-left and angle-of-turn decision, and select the correct line to follow when more than one path converged on the dot. The error rates that characterized the performance of the older group indicated that even when accuracy is stressed over speed, older adults are less accurate than young people. The participants in this study did not appear to be making the speed-accuracytrade-offs that are claimed to explain the error rate differences in traditional mental rotation studies (Jacewicz & Hartley, 1987). The analysis of number of correct decisions to first error in which older people were less accurate on the latter three maps suggests that the complexity of the stimuli or route length may be relevant factors in this regard. The finding that women did more poorly on this task is congruent with the male-female differences in spatial and mental rotation abilities reported elsewhere in the literature (Berg et al., 1982;Cerella et al., 1981;McGee, 1979;Schaie & Strother, 1968;Tapley & Bryden, 1977). It is important to note, however, that the sex differences were due primarily to the poor performance of the older women. The explanation for the differential performance of elderly females is not readily apparent. Superficially, it is easy to suggest that aging exacerbates the sex differences that have been demonstrated in numerous tests of spatial performance. If this were the case, however, older women should not show the beneficial effects of practice and training reported in previous research on spatial performance (Willis & Schaie, 1986). Such results suggest that the differences are, in part, due to experience. Some of the older women in the present study commented
that they did not drive or, as passengers, help navigate, and claimed that difficulty with the map-following task was due to this inexperience. Young women of today are more likely to drive than are older women and they tend to be involved in a wider range of careers and activities that include more extensive experience with spatial tasks. Thus, the present results may be due to experiential factors specific to the older cohort. Other research has indicated that college students.who report a poor sense of direction make more direction judgement errors than those with a good sense of tiirection, particularly when the judgement requires a mental realignment between self and environment (Kozlowski & Bryant, 1977;Sholl, 1988). The participants in the present study were asked to rate their perceived sense of direction on a five-point scale with 1 indicating a good sense of direction and 5 indicating a poor sense of tlirection. Older adults rated their sense of direction as poorer than young people, F(1,60) = 15.2,p < .001,but there were no sex differences on this question. Correlations between this rating and the number of correct decisions to first error were negative, although not statistically significant, indicating a trend for those with a poor sense of direction to be less accurate. All of the time measures relating to map misalignment correlated significantly with the rating of sense of direction (r = .27,p < .05to r = .47,p < .Ol), suggesting that those people with a poor sense of direction take longer to make direction decisions. The present findings have some important implications for understanding age-related difficulties in orientation. In a real world map-following situation both young and elderly people are likely to have success if they turn the map while following the route. In contrast, most people, particularly those who are elderly, are more likely to have difficulty when the map is not or cannot be turned, as in the case of stationary you-are-here maps. You-are-here maps frequently are inappropriately located and/or misaligned with the surrounding environment (Levine et al., 1984). With such maps, once the appropriate mental transformations have been effected, the route must be kept in memory after the person leaves the map. This requirement further compounds the difficulty for older adults. The present results suggest that older people, especially older women, might find the use of misaligned you-are-here maps particularly difficult. The results of the present research provide evidence that mental realignment is an important component of active wayfinding and that the difficulties older people have with such tasks may be due, in part, to this component. Further research is necessary to assess the influence of variations in map complexity and route length on the efficiency of route completion. As well, the relationship between traditional mental rotation tasks and wayfinding tasks that require mental realignment needs to be investigated.
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