The role of personality in route learning in young and older adults

This study newly explored the relationship between personality (also considering its facets) and an environmental ability as crucial to day-to-day living, and sensitive to age-related decline, as route learning, in young and older adults. Thirty-five young adults (Mage = 24.06, SD = 3.29) and 35 older adults (Mage = 68.34, SD = 3.26) completed the Big Five questionnaire, learned a new route from a video and were then asked to recall the order and the location of the landmarks encountered along the path (i.e., the landmark ordering and the landmark locating tasks). Hierarchical regression analyses showed that age negatively predicted performance in both landmark ordering and landmark locating tasks. For the landmark locating task, an additional significant part of the variance was also explained by some personality facets: Perseverance, Emotion Control and Openness to Experience. As well as confirming an age-related decline in route learning ability, our findings also highlight the protective effect of certain personality facets on route learning performance in a task that demands a major manipulation of previously-acquired environmental information.