Imagery in healthy and in cognitively impaired aging

The aim of the study was to compare the performance of persons both with and without cognitive impairment in different imagery tasks and to correlate these tasks with others involving attention, memory, and spatial perception, but not requiring active generation and/or transformation of mental images. A battery of tests measuring mental imagery skills involving generation, maintenance, and manipulation of different categories of images was administered to 79 persons aged 65 to 89 years, subdivided in two paired groups based on the presence or absence of cognitive deterioration. In most tasks requiring both inspection and transformation of images, subjects with cognitive impairment showed significantly poorer performance. Relations among imagery and other cognitive functions in the two groups are analyzed and discussed.