Kilb Angela, Naveh-Benjamin Moshe
University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri 65211, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2007 Jul;35(5):1162-74. doi: 10.3758/bf03193486.
The present experiments investigated whether the observed associative deficit in older adults' episodic memory is mediated by a reduction of attentional resources. Using a dual-task procedure, younger and older participants studied lists of word pairs either under full attention or while performing a concurrent task. Both experiments showed that dividing attention did not cause a greater impairment to memory for associations than to memory for items in either age group. Furthermore, an analysis of concurrent task performance revealed that older adults' attentional costs for both learning and binding items were not larger than for learning items alone, relative to younger adults. These data provide support for a multicausal interpretation of older adults' memory deficits in which common, depleted attentional resources may be a mechanism that reduces memory for components of an episode in both older and younger adults under divided attention at encoding. In addition, older adults have a unique deficit in memory for the associations between the components, which does not seem to be resource dependent.
目前的实验研究了老年人情景记忆中观察到的联想缺陷是否由注意力资源的减少所介导。采用双任务程序，年轻和年长参与者在全神贯注或执行并发任务的情况下学习单词对列表。两个实验均表明，分心对两个年龄组中联想记忆的损害并不比对项目记忆的损害更大。此外，对并发任务表现的分析表明，相对于年轻人，老年人在学习和绑定项目时的注意力成本并不比仅学习项目时更高。这些数据为老年人记忆缺陷的多因素解释提供了支持，其中常见的、耗尽的注意力资源可能是一种机制，在编码时分心的情况下，减少了老年人和年轻人对情景组成部分的记忆。此外，老年人在记忆组成部分之间的联想方面存在独特的缺陷，这似乎与资源无关。
