Nebes R D, Andrews-Kulis M E
Exp Aging Res. 1976 Jul;2(4):315-21. doi: 10.1080/03610737608257989.
To test the hypothesis that older persons tend not to use verbal mediators in paired-associate learning because it takes them too long to form an appropriate mediator, the time needed by young and old subjects to generate sentences incorporating given pairs of nouns was measured. Older subjects formed sentences just as rapidly as did the young. Despite their equivalent speed in creating these verbal associations when tested later for the occurrence of incidental learning of the noun pairs, the older subjects showed much poorer recall than did the younger subjects. This age difference in learning did not appear to be a function of any major dissimilarities in the generated sentences themselves, i.e., in the grammatical constructions used, or in the imageability of the relationships expressed by the sentences. The rated imagery value of the stimulus nouns was found to affect both the speed of sentence formation and the accuracy of incidental learning; in both younger and older subjects, formation time was less, and recall was better for the high imagery noun pairs.
为了验证这样一个假设，即老年人在配对联想学习中往往不使用言语中介物，因为他们需要太长时间来形成合适的中介物，研究人员测量了年轻人和老年人生成包含给定名词对的句子所需的时间。老年受试者造句的速度与年轻人一样快。尽管在后来测试名词对的偶然学习发生率时，他们在创建这些言语联想方面速度相当，但老年受试者的回忆表现比年轻受试者差得多。学习中的这种年龄差异似乎并不是由所生成句子本身的任何主要差异造成的，也就是说，不是由所使用的语法结构，或句子所表达关系的形象性造成的。研究发现，刺激名词的评定形象价值会影响造句速度和偶然学习的准确性；对于高形象性名词对，无论是年轻受试者还是老年受试者，造句时间都更短，回忆也更好。
