Ai, Yang, and Wang investigated tools that make it less likely that people get lost as they travel from one space to another. The team analyzed data from people 66 years old and older and people 65 and under, focusing on when study participants needed to decide how to move through a space “when the navigation aid was a map, a map plus self-updating (Global Positioning System [GPS]), or a text. After the wayfinding task, they completed two spatial memory tasks recalling scenes and drawing the routes. . . . younger adults outperformed older adults on most outcome measures. The text and the GPS conditions benefited older adults’ wayfinding behaviors more than the map condition, as indicated by route decision accuracies and reaction times. However, the map condition was associated with better route memory than the text condition. Experiment 2 aimed to replicate the results using more complex environments. . . . The advantage of the text over the map conditions was again found in wayfinding behaviors for older adults. However, no difference was found between the map and the text conditions in route memory. No difference was found between the GPS and the map conditions in any outcome measures.”
Ling Ai, Yingying Yang, and Qi Wang. 2023. “The Effects of Different Navigational Aids on Wayfinding and Spatial Memory for Older Adults.” Psychology and Aging, vol. 38, no. 7, pp. 670-683, https://doi.org/10.1037/pag0000732