The role of spatial abilities and self-assessments in cardinal point orientation across the lifespan (original) (raw)

Section snippets

Participants

The study involved 450 people from 20 to 91

years of age, divided into seven age brackets (people in their twenties to eighties), with 37 to 92 participants in each age group (see Table 1).

Participants were residents of various cities all over Italy. They were community dwellers and volunteers recruited by word of mouth. A health and demographic questionnaire was used to ensure that participants had no ongoing psychiatric or neurologic diseases (and were not taking any psychoactive drugs), and

Spatial tasks

Shortened versions (s) of tried and tested tasks (see the battery standardized by De Beni et al., 2014) were used, which preserved a good internal reliability, comparable with that of the original versions (see Table 2; see also Borella et al., 2014).

The short Embedded Figure Test (sEFT, adapted from Oltman et al., 1971) involves identifying simple shapes (shown separately) embedded in a more complex overall figure (10 items).

The short Mental Rotations Test (sMRT, adapted from Vandenberg &

Scoring

For the sEFT and sMRT, one point was awarded for each correct answer (two correct options for the sMRT and one correct option for the sEFT). For the sOPT we calculated the absolute degrees of error between the answers given and the right answer.

For the spatial self-assessment measures we calculated the sum of the Likert values for all items (for the SDSR and SAS) and for the two sub-aspects (for the AtOT).

For the WM tasks the final score corresponded to the length of the longest

Discussion

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between environment orientation – assessed in terms of a person's ability to point in cardinal directions from their position in their own home town (because this represents a modality to test environment knowledge; Montello & Raubal, 2012), age, objectively and subjectively-measured spatial skills, and WM throughout the adult lifespan. Although it has been demonstrated that aging coincides with a decline both in environment

Acknowledgments

This research was supported by a grant awarded to Erika Borella by the University of Padova (CPDA110373/11).