Lien Mei-Ching, Allen Philip A, Ruthruff Eric, Grabbe Jeremy, McCann Robert S, Remington Roger W
Department of Psychology, Oregon State University, Corvallis, 97331, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2006 Sep;21(3):431-47. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.21.3.431.
The present experiments examined the automaticity of word recognition. The authors examined whether people can recognize words while central attention is devoted to another task and how this ability changes across the life span. In Experiment 1, a lexical decision Task 2 was combined with either an auditory or a visual Task 1. Regardless of the Task 1 modality, Task 2 word recognition proceeded in parallel with Task 1 central operations for older adults but not for younger adults. This is a rare example of improved cognitive processing with advancing age. When Task 2 was nonlexical (Experiment 2), however, there was no evidence for greater parallel processing for older adults. Thus, the processing advantage appears to be restricted to lexical processes. The authors conclude that greater cumulative experience with lexical processing leads to greater automaticity, allowing older adults to more efficiently perform this stage in parallel with another task.
本实验研究了单词识别的自动性。作者研究了在集中注意力于另一任务时人们是否能够识别单词，以及这种能力在整个生命周期中是如何变化的。在实验1中，词汇判断任务2与听觉或视觉任务1相结合。无论任务1的模态如何，对于老年人来说，任务2的单词识别与任务1的中枢操作并行进行，但年轻人并非如此。这是随着年龄增长认知加工改善的一个罕见例子。然而，当任务2是非词汇性的时（实验2），没有证据表明老年人有更强的并行加工能力。因此，加工优势似乎仅限于词汇加工过程。作者得出结论，词汇加工方面更多的累积经验会导致更强的自动性，使老年人能够更有效地与另一任务并行执行这一阶段的任务。
