Neuroscience Letters 602 (2015) 79–83 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Neuroscience Letters journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/neulet Age effect in generating mental images of buildings but not common objects L. Piccardi a,b,∗ , R. Nori c , L. Palermo b,d , C. Guariglia b,e , F. Giusberti c a Life, Health and Environmental Science Department, University of L ′ Aquila, Italy b Neuropsychology Unit, I.R.C.C.S., Fondazione Santa Lucia, Roma, Italy c Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy d School of Life & Health Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, UK e Dipartimento di Psicologia, Università Sapienza degli Studi di Roma, Italy h i g h l i g h t s • Different types of mental images exist: building and common objects. • Imagining building is strictly related to topographical orientation. • Topographical orientation is affected by normal aging. • Our results show that young subjects do not differ in imaging buildings and objects. • Differently, older subjects found easier imaging objects than buildings. a r t i c l e i n f o Article history: Received 13 April 2015 Received in revised form 12 June 2015 Accepted 29 June 2015 Available online 3 July 2015 Keywords: Aging Visual mental imagery Kosslyn’s model Generation process Mental images Human navigation a b s t r a c t Imagining a familiar environment is different from imagining an environmental map and clinical evi- dence demonstrated the existence of double dissociations in brain-damaged patients due to the contents of mental images. Here, we assessed a large sample of young and old participants by considering their ability to generate different kinds of mental images, namely, buildings or common objects. As buildings are environmental stimuli that have an important role in human navigation, we expected that elderly par- ticipants would have greater difficulty in generating images of buildings than common objects. We found that young and older participants differed in generating both buildings and common objects. For young participants there were no differences between buildings and common objects, but older participants found easier to generate common objects than buildings. Buildings are a special type of visual stimuli because in urban environments they are commonly used as landmarks for navigational purposes. Con- sidering that topographical orientation is one of the abilities mostly affected in normal and pathological aging, the present data throw some light on the impaired processes underlying human navigation. © 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction Visual mental imagery refers to the experience of percep- tion in the absence of a corresponding physical stimulus [1]. Different aspects of this process have important roles in many everyday life cognitive functions (i.e., memory, abstract reasoning, spatial reasoning and topographical orientation: [2–4]). The multi- componential process described in Kosslyn’s model [5] suggests the existence of three different imagery processes: generation, which ∗ Corresponding author at: Dipartimento di Scienze della Salute, Via Vetoio, Cop- pito 2, 67100 L’Aquila, Italy. Fax: +39 0 651501366. E-mail address: laura.piccardi@cc.univaq.it (L. Piccardi). creates the image in the visual buffer (i.e., a mental screen in which the subject visualizes the image); inspection, which allows iden- tifying parts and relations within the image; and transformation, which allows manipulating the image, for example, by rotating or translating it. Although loss of the ability to form visual mental images has been reported following lesions of the left hemisphere [6–11], sev- eral neuroimaging studies have shown that processing of visual mental images is bilaterally distributed [12–16], thus emphasizing the important involvement of the right hemisphere. This complex process seems to be affected by age. Neural substrates of age-related declines in mental imagery were inves- tigated by Raz et al. [17] who found that the volumes of the dorso-lateral pre-frontal cortex (DLPFC) and the fusiform cortex http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neulet.2015.06.058 0304-3940/© 2015 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.