Li Karen Z H, Dupuis Kate
Department of Psychology, Concordia University, 7141 Sherbrooke St. West, Montréal, Québec, Canada H4B 1R6.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2008 Feb;127(2):416-27. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.08.006. Epub 2007 Sep 14.
The sequential flanker task was developed to study sequential performance using methodology borrowed from studies of task switching. We investigated age differences in backward inhibition [BI: Mayr, U., & Keele, S. W. (2000). Changing internal constraints on action: The role of backward inhibition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 129, 4-26] during a sequential category search task. Participants learned four animal categories in a fixed order, and then searched for exemplars from those categories in runs of mis-ordered exemplars. Across three experiments, we observed robust BI facilitation effects. However, the magnitude of BI effects did not differ across age groups. This age-invariance held despite manipulations of distractibility (Experiment 2), and interstimulus interval (Experiment 3), suggesting that BI processes may be relatively automatic and obligatory in the context of sequential tasks. The findings are discussed in terms of the attentional mechanisms that underlie task set switching and sequential performance.
序列侧翼任务是借鉴任务转换研究的方法而开发出来用于研究序列执行情况的。我们在一项序列类别搜索任务中研究了反向抑制（BI：迈尔，U.，& 基尔，S. W.（2000年）。改变对行动的内部限制：反向抑制的作用。《实验心理学杂志：总论》，129，4 - 26）方面的年龄差异。参与者按固定顺序学习四个动物类别，然后在乱序排列的范例序列中搜索这些类别的范例。在三个实验中，我们观察到了显著的BI促进效应。然而，BI效应的大小在不同年龄组之间没有差异。尽管对分心程度（实验2）和刺激间隔（实验3）进行了操控，但这种年龄不变性依然存在，这表明在序列任务的背景下，BI过程可能相对自动且是必然发生的。我们根据任务集转换和序列执行背后的注意力机制对这些发现进行了讨论。
