A Comparison of the Effects of Older Age on Homing Performance in Real and Virtual Environments

Virtual reality (VR) has become a popular tool for studying navigation, providing the experimental control of a laboratory setting but also the potential for immersive and natural experiences that resemble the real world. For VR to be an effective tool to study navigation and be used for training or rehabilitation, it is important to establish whether performance is similar across virtual and real environments. Much of the existing navigation research has focused on young adult performance either in a virtual or a real environment, resulting in an open question regarding the validity of VR for studying age-related effects on spatial navigation. In this paper, young (18–30 years old) and older adults (60 years and older) performed the same navigation task in similar real and virtual environments. They completed a homing task, requiring walking along two legs of a triangle and returning to a home location, under three sensory conditions: visual cues (environmental landmarks present), body-based self-motion cues, and the combination of both cues. Our findings reveal that homing performance in VR demonstrates the same age-related differences as those observed in the real-world task. That said, within-age group differences arise when comparing cue use across environment types. In particular, young adults are less accurate and more variable with self-motion cues than visual cues in VR, while older adults show similar deficits with both cues. However, when both age groups can access multiple sensory cues, navigation performance does not differ between environment types. These results demonstrate that VR effectively captures age-related differences, with navigation performance most closely resembling performance in the real world when navigators can rely on an array of sensory information. Such findings have implications for future research on the aging population, highlighting that VR can be a valuable tool, particularly when multisensory cues are available.