Age effect in generating mental images of buildings but not common objects

tImagining a familiar environment is different from imagining an environmental map and clinical evi-dence demonstrated the existence of double dissociations in brain-damaged patients due to the contentsof mental images. Here, we assessed a large sample of young and old participants by considering theirability to generate different kinds of mental images, namely, buildings or common objects. As buildingsare environmental stimuli that have an important role in human navigation, we expected that elderly par-ticipants would have greater difficulty in generating images of buildings than common objects. We foundthat young and older participants differed in generating both buildings and common objects. For youngparticipants there were no differences between buildings and common objects, but older participantsfound easier to generate common objects than buildings. Buildings are a special type of visual stimulibecause in urban environments they are commonly used as landmarks for navigational purposes. Con-sidering that topographical orientation is one of the abilities mostly affected in normal and pathologicalaging, the present data throw some light on the impaired processes underlying human navigation.