Our navigation skills—the ability to select and follow a route from one place to another—is a skill we use daily, but it changes as we age. How people in mid-life explore new spaces is reported in a study at the University of California Irvine. Compared to a group of young people going through a maze, the older group paused longer at decision points and generally took longer to complete the maze. Authors say the differences were so significant that they could predict the age of the volunteer just by those times. The results, in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, could lead to training middle-age people to improve their navigation skills and preserve or at least slow the natural decline in cognitive ability.