Forty six participants (23 young adults [12 females; mean age 20.57 +-2.57 years; range, 18-28] and 23 older adults [11 females; mean age 72.17 +- 5.56 years; range, 63-85]) took part in the experiment. We administered the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA; Nasreddine et al., 2005) to the older participants to screen for mild cognitive impairment. One older participant was excluded based on the recently recommended MoCA cutoff score for MCI of 23 (Luis et al., 2009). The remaining older participants had a mean MoCa score 26.74 (range 23-30). 
 
 In this study we present a route learning paradigm inspired by Allen & Kirasic (2003). Specifically, we presented participants with a video of a long route through a virtual environment that consists of decision points, straight segments and simple turns, thus systematically manipulating the navigational relevance of spatial situations along the route. We used an auditory-probe task to measure attentional engagement during the learning of the route (cf. Allen & Kirasic, 2003). To investigate whether attentional engagement contributes to aging-related navigation deficits we compared route learning performance and response times to the auditory probe in different spatial situations between a young and an older participant group.