- 期刊
Age-Related Navigation Impairment in Virtual Reality Path Integration Task: A Feasibility and Effectiveness Study
摘要
Background: The senescence of brain neural mechanisms caused by aging has effects on the decline of human spatial navigation ability. Although a large number of studies have demonstrated that aging can cause impairment of old adults' spatial navigation performance when using allocentric navigation strategies, and also the impairment of older adults ' performance in choosing and switching between navigation strategies, however, there is little research on the basic mechanism of old adults when using egocentric navigation strategy. In this study, we aimed to test the effectiveness of path integration tasks in the study of older adults' spatial navigation performance when using egocentric navigation strategies under an immersive virtual reality paradigm. Methods: Facing the current situation of global Alzheimer's disease, combined with virtual reality technology, 42 volunteers with an average age of 74.5 years old were tested in four different situations. The experimental results have a certain reference nature. Results: The subjects are separated by age and gender. To explore the factors that influence the result of Path integration experiment, one-way ANOVA and General liner Model of Univariate Anova is used to assess the Demographic differences between age and gender. The conclusion of this research is that age would influence people's result of task. Among the aged, older people have worse navigation ability than the younger people. Besides, gender would not influence the result of path integration task. Conclusions: This study demonstrated that path integration task under virtual reality environment has optional value in evaluating spatial navigation ability when old adults are using egocentric navigation strategies.