Borella Erika, Carretti Barbara, De Beni Rossana
Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, Via Venezia, 8, 35131 Padova, Italy.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2008 May;128(1):33-44. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2007.09.008. Epub 2007 Nov 5.
Research has shown that age-related changes in cognitive performance are due mostly to the decline of general factors such as working memory and inhibition. The present study is aimed at investigating age-related changes in these mechanisms across the adult life-span from 20 to 86 years of age. Results indicate a linear relationship between each working memory measure and age, independently of the nature of the task, and a quadratic relationship between the single inhibitory measures and age. Moreover, hierarchical regression analyses show that inhibition accounts for a significant, but modest, part of the age-related variance in working memory. Taken together, these results suggest that inhibition is not as crucial a contributor of age-related changes in the functional capacity of working memory across the adult life-span as previously thought.
研究表明，认知能力与年龄相关的变化主要归因于工作记忆和抑制等一般因素的衰退。本研究旨在调查20至86岁成年期这些机制与年龄相关的变化。结果表明，每个工作记忆指标与年龄之间存在线性关系，与任务性质无关，而单一抑制指标与年龄之间存在二次关系。此外，分层回归分析表明，抑制在工作记忆与年龄相关的差异中占显著但适度的部分。综上所述，这些结果表明，在整个成年期，抑制并非如之前所认为的那样，是工作记忆功能能力与年龄相关变化的关键因素。
