Abstract
Visuospatial abilities encompass processing and manipulating spatial information about visual objects. Studies suggest that these abilities may decline with age, but the nature of these changes remains understudied. To investigate this phenomenon, 52 healthy adults ranging from 40 to 85 years old (M=58.38, SD=12.63) participated in a home-based online study assessing visuospatial processing speed, attention, discrimination, memory, 3D mental rotation, online motor control and working memory. We correlated performance in terms of error rates and reaction times (RTs) with age, and compared performance across four age groups (40s, 50s, 60s and 70s and up). For most tasks, RTs were correlated with age and were longer for older age groups, whereas no difference was found for discrimination performance. Notably, age correlated with RT in response to a target jump (r=0.44, p=0.001). In a mirror reversal task, movement time to reach the target was correlated with age, in mirrored (r=0.35, p=0.02) and baseline (r=0.42, p=0.003) conditions, but error rates was not. Age also correlated with RTs in a visual discrimination task involving familiar (r=0.42, p=0.003) and unfamiliar objects (r=0.37, p=0.009), but not discrimination accuracy. In mental rotation, correct performance did not vary with age, but RTs did (r=0.36, p=0.01). In the spatial working memory nback task, age correlated with RT for 1-back (r=0.3, p=0.04) and 2-back trials (r=0.35, p=0.02), but again performance did not. Furthermore, no correlation was found between age and performance in visual search and visual memory tasks. These results demonstrate that visuospatial cognitive changes over the lifespan are likely due to slowing processing and motor speed with age, which was observed in lower-level motor tasks and baseline conditions, and in higher-level visual executive function tasks. Aside from this general processing speed cost, we did not observe further impairments, suggesting that visuospatial abilities are largely preserved in healthy aging.