The effects of age and environmental familiarity on adults' spatial problem-solving performance: evidence of a hometown advantage.

A coordination of perspectives problem was presented to young, middle-aged, and elderly adults in two spatial settings. In a novel spatial array, elderly adults were less accurate than the other groups under both perspective-taking and mental rotation instructions, and mental rotation was more difficult than perspective-taking for the elderly adults. In contrast, there were no differences between age groups or between perspective-taking and mental rotation when the problem was presented using locations in the subjects' hometown. An explanation based on working memory demands was suggested for these results.