and females can perform successfully. However, the ability to form mental representations of new environments after navigation is impacted by different patterns of relations involving strategy, beliefs/self-efficacy and visuospatial cognitive abilities. Therefore, both males and females involve the use of visuospatial individual factors, abilities and inclinations, that with different patterns of relations influence navigation and wayfinding performance. Age differences The ability to learn the environment and navigate increases with age. Age group comparison studies show that children become able earlier to acquire and to manage egocentric knowledge (as to repeat a path) and later (at least most of evidence) show allocentric knowledge (as expressed by finding shortest paths) even these abilities can be subject to individual differences also in children. In older adults abilities in spatial domain decrease showing a decrease of spatial learning and representation abilities, even the differences between young and older adults are related to type of tasks. In fact older adults are more sensible to decline in allocentric knowledge with respect to the younger ones. Visuo-spatial abilities (as visuospatial working memory and rotation) decline in ageing and attitudes tend to be maintained quite stable; both abilities and attitudes, however, in different extent contribute to maintain the spatial learning and navigation accuracy in elderly. See also Spatial ability Spatial contextual awareness Spatial memory Sense of direction Space mapping References External links Spatial Cognition and Computation http://www.spatial-cognition.de/ What is Spatial Cognition? An article describing spatial cognition The Spatial Intelligence and Learning Center (SILC) Cognition Spatial cognition