Deciding whether a place is the same or different than places encountered previously is a common task in daily navigation which requires to develop knowledge about the locations of objects (object‐location binding) and to recognize places from different perspectives. These abilities rely on hippocampal functioning which is susceptible to increasing age. Thus, the question of the present study is how they both together impact on place recognition in aging. Forty people aged 20–29, 44 aged 60–69, and 32 aged 70–79 were presented with places consisting of four different objects during the encoding phase. In the test phase, they were then presented with a second place and had to decide whether it was the same or different. Test places were presented from different perspectives (0°, 30°, 60°) and with different object conditions (same, a swap of two objects, a substitution with a novel object). The sensitivity for detecting changes (d′) decreased from 20–29 to 60–69 and to 70–79 years old, and with increasing perspective shifts. Importantly, older adults were less sensitive to object swapping than to object substitution, while young participants did not show any difference. Overall, these results suggest specific age‐related difficulties in object‐location binding in the context of place recognition.

The ability to recognise places is known to deteriorate with advancing age. In this study, we investigated the contribution of age-related changes in spatial encoding strategies to declining place recognition ability. We recorded eye movements while younger and older adults completed a place recognition task first described by Muffato et al. (2019). Participants first learned places, which were defined by an array of four objects, and then decided whether the next place they were shown was the same or different to the one they learned. Places could be shown from the same spatial perspective as during learning or from a shifted perspective (30° or 60°). Places that were different to those during learning were changed either by substituting an object in the place with a novel object or by swapping the locations of two objects. We replicated the findings of Muffato et al. (2019) showing that sensitivity to detect changes in a place declined with advancing age and declined when the spatial perspective was shifted. Additionally, older adults were particularly impaired on trials in which object locations were swapped; however, they were not differentially affected by perspective changes compared to younger adults. During place encoding, older adults produced more fixations and saccades, shorter fixation durations, and spent less time looking at objects compared to younger adults. Further, we present an analysis of gaze chaining, designed to capture spatio-temporal aspects of gaze behaviour. The chaining measure was a significant predictor of place recognition performance. We found significant differences between age groups on the chaining measure and argue that these differences in gaze behaviour are indicative of differences in encoding strategy between age groups. In summary, we report a direct replication of Muffato et al. (2019) and provide evidence for age-related differences in spatial encoding strategies, which are related to place recognition performance.

Two studies were conducted to investigate age-related differences between young and older adults in the impact of a map being available or not while performing aligned and counter-aligned pointing tasks. In the first study, 19 young adults (aged 20-30) and 19 young-old adults (aged 65-74) studied a map and performed a pointing task. In the second, three groups of adults, 19 of them young (aged 20-30), 19 young-old (aged 65-74), and 19 old-old (aged 75-84), studied a map and performed a pointing task, first with the map available, and then without it. The results of both studies showed that young and older adults' performance was similar in aligned pointing, while the young performed better than the older adults in counter-aligned pointing. Analyzing the types of error, results showed that older adults made more counter-aligned pointing errors than young adults, both with and without the map. Having the map available improved all participants' performance, however. Finally, visuo-spatial working memory was found to sustain pointing performance in all age groups and map conditions. Overall, these findings suggest that older adults are specifically susceptible to the alignment effect-making more counter-aligned errors-regardless of whether or not they have a map available while performing pointing tasks.

Visuo-spatial abilities have an important role in environment learning. The aim of the present study was to explore whether these abilities relate to spatial recall after learning an environment from a map or a video, and irrespective of the learner's age (from youth to old age). The study involved 431 participants from 25 to 84 years old, who were assessed for their visuo-spatial working memory, object-based mental rotation, and perspectivetaking abilities. Then, they learned environments from a map and a video, and performed pointing, map drawing, and route repetition tasks after learning from each type of input. The resulting path models showed that age related to visuo-spatial abilities and (in some cases) to spatial accuracy, too. After accounting for age, visuo-spatial abilities also related to spatial recall performance, whatever the type of learning input, especially in pointing tasks and, to a lesser degree, in map drawing and route repetition tasks. Overall, the relationship between individual visuo-spatial abilities and environment learning relates to the learning input and the type of task used to assess recall. This relationship was found in a large and diverse sample of participants ranging from youth to old age.