Castegnaro, Andrea;
Dior, Alexander;
Burgess, Neil;
King, John;
(2025)
Continuous Updating via Self-Motion Compensates for Weak Allocentric Spatial Memory in Aging.
Psychology and Aging
10.1037/pag0000926.
(In press).
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Abstract
Navigational skills are essential for interacting with our environment, supported by multiple types of spatial representations. We investigated age-related differences in spatial memory using a virtual reality task that manipulated viewpoints between the encoding and retrieval of one or four-object locations. The task investigates compensatory mechanisms in aging, specifically how spatial updating via self-motion affects spatial memory. We tested 21 young adults (ages 19–36) and 23 older adults (ages 63–80). The task involved three movement conditions: same-viewpoint condition, where participants walked away and returned to the same viewpoint; shifted-viewpoint (walking) condition where participants walked to a different viewpoint, enabling continuous updates of their egocentric representations through self-motion; and shifted-viewpoint (teleport) condition where participants teleported to the other viewpoint, involving both a virtual translation and rotation of the participant’s view. Retrieval was tested by asking participants to place each object at its previously seen location. Average displacement error was affected by age group, object configuration, and movement condition, with an interaction between age and movement condition. Differences in movement conditions were primarily driven by older participants, who were most accurate from the same viewpoint. In shifted-viewpoint conditions, teleportation—where self-motion cues were absent—led to significantly greater errors than walking in the older group. Our results highlight the role of spatial updating in supporting spatial memory and suggest that age-related decline in allocentric representations can be mitigated by continuous updating of egocentric representations by self-motion. We speculate that the use of spatial updating might be impaired early in the progression to Alzheimer’s dementia due to entorhinal cortical pathology.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Continuous Updating via Self-Motion Compensates for Weak Allocentric Spatial Memory in Aging |
| Location: | United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1037/pag0000926 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000926 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0). This license permits copying and redistributing the work in any medium or format, as well as adapting the material for any purpose, even commercially |
| Keywords: | spatial memory, self-motion, spatial updating, virtual reality, healthy aging |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Brain Sciences > UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology > Clinical and Experimental Epilepsy |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212348 |
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