The influence of the exploration on the map memory

: The comparison of semantic relatedness effects in older- and younger adults.

Abstract

It is well known that when asking the location of landmarks on a map, distances between semantically related landmarks are recollected shorter than those between non-related landmarks (Hirtle & Mascolo, 1986), but a previous study (Thomas et al., 2012) reported that with older adults, those effects of semantic relatedness between landmarks were weak or none. However, in the tasks used in those previous studies, participants were simply instructed to memorize a map, which deviates from everyday situations of learning a map, like spatial/physical exploration, or exploring on a map. In the present study, with a new task to search for the specified targets on the maps, an experiment with 20 older- and 20 younger participants was executed, and the results showed that the effect of semantic relatedness on the distance estimation was clearly shown in both the younger- and older adults groups.