Age-related changes in decision making with different wayfinding strategies

Wayfinding skills are known to decay in older age. The present study investigated the differential effects of older age on five cognitive strategies that travelers can use for decision-making at intersections. To avoid interindividual and methodological biases, we used a within-person approach, and designed similar environments for all strategies. Thirty young and thirty older adults were asked to navigate five mazes that required decision-making by either the serial order strategy, the associative cue strategy, the beacon strategy, the relative location strategy, or the cognitive map strategy. The order of the five mazes was counterbalanced using a Latin square design; to reduce fatigue, the mazes were administered over two separate sessions. In agreement with extant research, we found that older participants' wayfinding accuracy was poorer than that of young ones. Contrary to literature, however, this age-related decrement was not more pronounced for the cognitive map strategy than for the serial order and the associative cue strategy. We also found that the correlation between wayfinding performance with different strategies decreased to virtually zero in older age. Further regarding the cognitive map strategy, we found that older adults showed reduced ability to acquire incidental knowledge during wayfinding, but with no evidence that they compensated for these deficits by relying on auxiliary environmental cues. We interpret this pattern of findings as evidence that age-related wayfinding deficits are sensitive to task difficulty and are associated with a disintegration of the cognitive mechanisms involved in wayfinding, particularly in tasks with high visuospatial demands and multitasking requirements.