Giffard Bénédicte, Desgranges Béatrice, Kerrouche Nacer, Piolino Pascale, Eustache Francis
Institut National de la Santé et de la Recherche Médicale (Inserm) E0128, Université de Caen, Caen, France.
Neuropsychology. 2003 Oct;17(4):594-601. doi: 10.1037/0894-4105.17.4.594.
Increased semantic priming effects (hyperpriming) are sometimes observed in Alzheimer's disease (AD) and in normal aging. Whereas the processes underlying this phenomenon are now well understood in AD, the interpretation is much more woolly in normal aging. To explore semantic priming, the authors used a lexical decision task in which the influence of attention and cognitive slowing was controlled. To explore the semantic organization, the words had coordinate (tiger-lion) or attribute relations (zebra-stripes). Priming scores of 21 older and 20 young participants were equivalent in the 2 conditions. These results reflect the integrity of semantic memory with normal aging and call into question some investigations showing hyperpriming for older participants; this may instead be an artifact of a general slowing effect.
在阿尔茨海默病（AD）和正常衰老过程中，有时会观察到语义启动效应增强（超启动）。虽然在AD中这种现象背后的机制现在已得到很好的理解，但在正常衰老中的解释却更加模糊。为了探究语义启动，作者使用了一种词汇判断任务，其中注意力和认知减慢的影响得到了控制。为了探究语义组织，这些单词具有并列（老虎 - 狮子）或属性关系（斑马 - 条纹）。21名老年参与者和20名年轻参与者在这两种条件下的启动分数相当。这些结果反映了正常衰老过程中语义记忆的完整性，并对一些显示老年参与者超启动的研究提出了质疑；这可能反而只是一般减慢效应的人为结果。
