Thomas Ruthann C, Hasher Lynn
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Psychol Aging. 2006 Dec;21(4):821-5. doi: 10.1037/0882-7974.21.4.821.
This study examined older and younger adults' attentional biases and subsequent incidental recognition memory for distracting positive, negative, and neutral words. Younger adults were more distracted by negative stimuli than by positive or neutral stimuli, and they correctly recognized more negative than positive words. Older adults, however, attended equally to all stimuli yet showed reliable recognition only for positive words. Thus, although an attentional bias toward negative words carried over into recognition performance for younger adults, older adults' bias appeared to be limited to remembering positive information.
本研究考察了老年人和年轻人对分散注意力的积极、消极和中性词汇的注意偏向及随后的附带识别记忆。与积极或中性刺激相比，年轻人更容易被消极刺激分散注意力，并且他们正确识别出的消极词汇比积极词汇更多。然而，老年人对所有刺激的关注度相同，但仅对积极词汇表现出可靠的识别能力。因此，尽管年轻人对消极词汇的注意偏向延续到了识别表现中，但老年人的偏向似乎仅限于记住积极信息。
