Abstract
In spatial environment learning tasks, previous studies have shown a greater decrease in the level of performance for older adults than for younger adults, caused by declines in specific spatial skills. In the present study, we hypothesized that the decreased performance of older adults is due to their decreased meta-cognitive ability and investigated the relationships between sense of direction, understandability of pathway descriptions, and wayfinding performance. Results showed that older adults judged their sense of direction and the understandability of pathway descriptions to be higher than did younger adults. They, however, did not show superior performance in the wayfinding task than the younger adults. These results indicate that the reason for the decreased performance in spatial cognition tasks is not only the decreased spatial abilities of older adults, but also their decreased meta-cognitive ability; older adults may judge their ability and understanding to be more positive than they actually are.
