Aging amplifies the influence of spatial contextual information on visual scene processing

Older adults rely increasingly on prior knowledge to make sense of their deteriorating representation of the visual world, but how this shapes scene perception and spatial reorientation remains unclear. To address this issue, 28 young and 25 older adults viewed artificially generated rooms either before or after learning the position of a goal hidden in an adjacent room. We manipulated both the number and the eccentricity of navigational affordances (i.e., open doors) to investigate the interaction between bottom-up scene features and top-down spatial knowledge. Consistent with previous findings, younger adults showed decreased performance as the number of open doors increased, but only after learning the goals position, indicating a top-down interaction with the automatic processing of affordances. Door eccentricity did not affect this interaction, suggesting our findings were not due to a distractor effect. In older adults, this interaction between prior spatial information and navigational affordances was markedly amplified: reaction times increased at twice the rate observed in younger adults. These findings show that prior spatial knowledge interacts with the automatic extraction of navigational affordances, and that this influence is markedly amplified with age. While prior knowledge helps stabilize perception when sensory processing becomes less reliable, it can also increase the processing time for complex scenes, particularly when multiple action possibilities are present. By revealing how aging shifts the balance between top-down and bottom-up mechanisms, these results refine models of age-related spatial navigation decline and highlight a trade-off whereby increased reliance on prior knowledge supports perception but can also slow interaction with complex environments.