Zacks Jeffrey M, Speer Nicole K, Vettel Jean M, Jacoby Larry L
Department of Psychology, Washington University, St. Louis, MO 63130-4899, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2006 Sep;21(3):466-82. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.21.3.466.
Segmenting ongoing activity into events is important for later memory of those activities. In the experiments reported in this article, older adults' segmentation of activity into events was less consistent with group norms than younger adults' segmentation, particularly for older adults diagnosed with mild dementia of the Alzheimer type. Among older adults, poor agreement with others' event segmentation was associated with deficits in recognition memory for pictures taken from the activity and memory for the temporal order of events. Impaired semantic knowledge about events also was associated with memory deficits. The data suggest that semantic knowledge about events guides encoding, facilitating later memory. To the extent that such knowledge or the ability to use it is impaired in aging and dementia, memory suffers.
将正在进行的活动分割成事件对于这些活动的后续记忆很重要。在本文所报道的实验中，与年轻人相比，老年人将活动分割成事件的方式与群体规范的一致性较低，尤其是被诊断患有阿尔茨海默型轻度痴呆的老年人。在老年人中，与他人事件分割的一致性差与对活动中拍摄图片的识别记忆以及事件时间顺序的记忆缺陷有关。关于事件的语义知识受损也与记忆缺陷有关。数据表明，关于事件的语义知识指导编码，促进后续记忆。在衰老和痴呆过程中，这种知识或使用它的能力受损的程度越大，记忆受到的影响就越大。
