Age and experience effects in spatial visualization.

Three studies were conducted to investigate effects related to age and experience on measures of spatial visualization ability. All research participants were college-educated men; those in the experienced group were practicing or recently retired architects. The major results of the studies were (a) that increased age was found to be associated with lower levels of performance on several tests of spatial visualization and (b) that this was true both for unselected adults and for adults with extensive spatial visualization experience. These findings seem to suggest that age-related effects in some aspects of cognitive functioning may be independent of experiential influences. An important hypothesis concerning the effects of adult age on cognitive functioning attributes the poorer performance of older adults to their lack of recent experience with relevant cognitive abilities. Perhaps the clearest statements of this disuse perspective were by early researchers (e.g., Sorenson, 1933, 1938; Thorndike, Bregman, Tilton, Willis, 1987). As an illustration of the commitment to this perspective, Kirasic and Allen (1985), in a recent review of research on age and spatial ability, stated as an assertion rather than an hypothesis, that A substantial difference. . . exists! between elderly adults' proficiency outside the psychological laboratory and their proficiency in performing tasks bearing an apparent relationship to their lives outside that setting. . . [and that age-related performance decrements are more likely to appear on novel tasks or those involving unfamiliar stimuli or settings than on familiar tasks or those involving well-known stimuli or settings, (p. 199) Despite considerable intuitive appeal and apparent widespread implicit acceptance, there is still very little evidence directly relevant to the disuse hypothesis of age-related cognitive decline. The studies in the current article were designed to investigate this hypothesis by examining the effects of age, experience, and the interrelations of age and experience on spatial visualization ability. Spatial visualization, as the term is used here, refers to the mental manipulation of spatial information to determine how a given spatial configuration would appear if portions of that configuration were to be rotated, folded, repositioned, or otherwise transformed. This construct has been identified in a number of factor-analytic studies (e.g., see Lohman, 1988, for a review), and has been found to have predictive validity for success in courses in geometry, drafting, and design (e.g.,