Dennis Nancy A, Howard James H, Howard Darlene V
Cognitive Aging Laboratory, Department of Psychology, The Catholic University of America, Washington, District of Columbia 20064, USA.
J Gerontol B Psychol Sci Soc Sci. 2003 Jul;58(4):P224-7. doi: 10.1093/geronb/58.4.p224.
Previous research has demonstrated age-related deficits in implicit learning of visual sequences characterized by subtle predictive relationships among the sequence elements. This study investigates whether this reflects modality-specific, or more general, sequence learning deficits by using an auditory sequence-learning task. Young and old adults responded with a key press to each of a series of unrelated spoken words. Unknown to the participants, every other word was presented in a fixed, repeating order with alternate words chosen at random. Both groups responded more quickly and accurately to the predictable than to unpredictable words, revealing sequence learning. However, elderly participants showed less learning than young participants on several measures. This suggests that age-related deficits in implicit sequence learning reflect a general impairment in learning subtle environmental covariations rather than a modality-specific visual impairment.
先前的研究表明，在以序列元素之间微妙的预测关系为特征的视觉序列内隐学习中，存在与年龄相关的缺陷。本研究通过使用听觉序列学习任务来调查这是否反映了特定模态的，或更普遍的序列学习缺陷。年轻人和老年人对一系列不相关的口语单词中的每一个都按键做出反应。参与者不知道的是，每隔一个单词以固定、重复的顺序呈现，交替的单词是随机选择的。两组对可预测单词的反应都比对不可预测单词更快、更准确，这表明存在序列学习。然而，在几项指标上，老年参与者的学习比年轻参与者少。这表明，与年龄相关的内隐序列学习缺陷反映了学习微妙环境协变关系方面的普遍损害，而不是特定模态的视觉损害。
