ADULT AGE-DIFFERENCES IN SPATIAL MEMORY - EFFECTS OF STRUCTURAL CONTEXT AND PRACTICE

We examined the effect of structural context on memory for spatial loc ation in young and elderly women in two studies. Subjects studied and later reconstructed an array of visually identical objects that were p ositioned in a three-dimensional Plexiglas matrix. For half the subjec ts, small household objects were interspersed in the array to serve as spatial landmark cues during encoding and replacement. All subjects r eceived two study and replacement trials. The results indicated that ( a) older women remembered fewer locations than younger women but benef itted more from landmark cues to location, (b) performance improved on the second replacement trial for the young but not for the older wome n, and (c) both age groups appeared to use similar processing strategi es that were based on the vertical dimension of space. These results s uggest that structural context enhances older adults' retention of thr ee-dimensional spatial information. The implications of these data for the conceptual distinction between structural and organizational aspe cts of spatial context are discussed.