Host: The Japanese Society for Cognitive Psychology
To investigate how people learn to use some ICT equipment, we used Groton Maze Learning Task (GMLT) with embedding some guiding information. In the experiment, we set three conditions: One with the forward-direction guides (easy to find their meaning), the other with the backward-direction guides (difficult to find their meaning), and the control condition (no guide information), examining how young and older adults (YA/OA) learned to use them to find out the correct route. The results showed the both age groups with the forward-direction guides could use the guiding information, showing decrease of the duration time and legal errors. In contrast, though YA with the backward-direction guides showed the same size learning facilitation as the forward-direction condition, OA didn’t show any privilege with the backward-direction guides. Those findings indicated the difficulties to use backward-direction guiding for OA may make their learning difficulties when they try to use some ICT equipment.
