The goal of this meta-analysis was to provide an estimation of the average effect of aging on intentional memory for spatial location in small-scale space. Findings from 22 studies, which represent the testing of 1,598 subjects, were compared using the following statistics: (a) d (Cohen, 1988), (b) omega2 (Hays, 1963), and (c) Proportion of classified subjects. The meta-analysis suggests that the effect of aging is “large” (e.g., the average d was 0.81), and that it is proportional to the number of dimensions of the array used. However, these conclusions have to be treated with caution because of some methodological limitations of the reviewed literature. In particular, less than half of the studies mentioned (a) control for differences often found between young and elderly adults in visual acuity, and (b) having used a test phase of fixed duration. It is recommended that future research on age-related deficits in spatial memory take into account these confounds.
