Verhaeghen Paul, Cerella John, Basak Chandramallika
Department of Psychology, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York 13244-2340, USA.
Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2006 Jun;13(2):254-80. doi: 10.1080/138255890969267.
We examined the information-processing functions (response-time x load) of younger and older adults for two verbal and one visuo-spatial task; each task was implemented in a baseline and a high-complexity condition. Heightened complexity transformed the baseline functions in either an additive or a multiplicative fashion. The processing efficiency of older adults was defined as the old-young ratio of the slopes of the load functions. Three levels of efficiency could be distinguished. The first level, with an age-related slowing factor of about 1.2, consisted of low-complexity verbal processing and additive-complexity verbal processing. The second level, associated with a slowing factor of about 1.6, consisted of a mixture of verbal-high-multiplicative-complexity processing and visuo-spatial-low-complexity processing. The third level, with a slowing factor of about 4, consisted of visuo-spatial processing of high multiplicative complexity. The results go against any common factor theory of aging. Instead, they suggest that a shift from a higher to a lower mode of efficiency is triggered by a greater degree of working memory involvement.
我们针对两项语言任务和一项视觉空间任务，考察了年轻人和老年人的信息处理功能（反应时间×负荷）；每项任务均在基线条件和高复杂度条件下实施。复杂度的提高以加法或乘法方式改变了基线功能。老年人的处理效率定义为负荷函数斜率的老年-青年比率。可区分出三个效率水平。第一个水平，年龄相关的减慢因子约为1.2，包括低复杂度语言处理和加法复杂度语言处理。第二个水平，与减慢因子约1.6相关，包括语言高乘法复杂度处理和视觉空间低复杂度处理的混合。第三个水平，减慢因子约为4，包括高乘法复杂度的视觉空间处理。这些结果与任何常见的衰老因素理论相悖。相反，它们表明工作记忆参与程度的提高会引发从较高效率模式向较低效率模式的转变。
