Navigating Tip Can Serve as a Memory Aid

The older person who has trouble remembering simple things like the route to a friend’s house or a store in his neighborhood can use basic navigation principles to overcome the problem, say researchers at the Catholic University of America.

Consciously using landmark identification the same way as ships or hikers can help the older person keep track of the way, according to Paula Darby Lipman of Rockville, Md., a recent Ph. D. graduate.

She and James E. Youniss, also a Catholic University of America professor, organized a study to determine how people of various ages remembered routes as part of their research on age-related memory function. They “walked” members of their study groups through slides representing trips through neighborhoods.

“Older persons tended to make a lot more personal associations with the routes. Younger persons looked strictly for ways to remember the routes. When I interviewed the oldest subjects, they often mentioned the flowers in the trees, the condition of the neighborhood, or the season,” Lipman says.

She says that older people may have wanted to make the identifying task more meaningful or personal to offset the burden of coping with all the information presented. But her study confirmed that those who concentrated on landmarks at turns were best able to recreate the routes from unordered slides.

“There’s so much information you can get from any route. It’s just that some of it is more important. Picking out the information that will help in remembering turns is easier than trying to remember all the landmarks in sequential order,” she says.

The study supports a widely held theory about aging and memory--that for many people, short-term memory decreases with age. Though some seem to use the landmark strategy naturally, others can learn the technique with a conscious effort, she says.