Visuospatial working memory game and measured memory performances at various ages

Because of rapid population aging, it is necessary to design and develop senior-friendly or disability-friendly interfaces that can decrease the cognitive workload caused by an interface. At that time, the design implications and evaluation criteria of an interface should be needed for creating senior-friendly and disability-friendly interfaces. One of the elements that relate to memory functions for manipulating interfaces include working memory. However, rough standard of visuospatial memory remains unknown. Particularly, there are little reports about the relations between the age and the volume of visuospatial memory. In this paper, we aim to clarify this relations for proposing interface implications by using a visual pattern span test. For effective measurement of the memory, we implemented a gamified measurement application based on visual pattern span tests. The results indicated that the median numbers of memorable buttons on visuospatial memory were and 7.0 (interquartile range: 5.0-9.0). Also, the number of memorable buttons increases as the age increases until the age ranged 21-25 and then decreases gradually as the age increases after 21-25 years. Our evaluation suggest that it can be effective to measure memory performance of, especially, children by the applications that are designed based on the entertainment concepts including a gamification.