Salthouse Timothy A, Siedlecki Karen L
Department of Psychology, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904, USA.
Brain Cogn. 2007 Apr;63(3):279-86. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2006.09.006. Epub 2006 Oct 31.
Two tasks hypothesized to assess the efficiency of route selection were administered to 328 adults ranging from 18 to 93 years of age. Increased age was associated with slower completion of mazes, even after adjusting for differences in perceptual-motor speed, and with longer and less accurate routes in a task in which participants were asked to visit designated exhibits in a zoo. The route selection measures were correlated with measures hypothesized to represent executive functioning, such as the number of categories in the Wisconsin card sorting test and the number of words generated in a category fluency test. However, most of the age-related influences on the measures from the route selection tasks were shared with age-related effects on established cognitive abilities, which implies that the same mechanisms may account for the relations of age on both sets of variables.
两项旨在评估路线选择效率的任务被施测于328名年龄在18岁至93岁之间的成年人。即使在调整了感知运动速度的差异之后，年龄增长仍与迷宫完成速度较慢相关，并且在一项要求参与者参观动物园指定展品的任务中，年龄增长还与更长且更不准确的路线相关。路线选择指标与假设用来代表执行功能的指标相关，比如威斯康星卡片分类测验中的分类数量以及类别流畅性测验中生成的单词数量。然而，路线选择任务指标中大多数与年龄相关的影响，与既定认知能力方面与年龄相关的影响是共同的，这意味着相同的机制可能解释了年龄与这两组变量之间的关系。
