Soldan Anja, Hilton H John, Cooper Lynn A, Stern Yaakov
Cognitive Neuroscience Division, Taub Institute for Research on Alzheimer's Disease and the Aging Brain, Columbia University Medical Center, NY, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2009 Mar;24(1):93-104. doi: 10.1037/a0014136.
Although priming of familiar stimuli is usually age invariant, little is known about how aging affects priming of preexperimentally unfamiliar stimuli. Therefore, this study investigated the effects of aging and encoding-to-test delays (0 min, 20 min, 90 min, and 1 week) on priming of unfamiliar objects in block-based priming paradigms. During the encoding phase, participants viewed pictures of novel objects (Experiments 1 and 2) or novel and familiar objects (Experiment 3) and judged their left-right orientation. In the test block, priming was measured using the possible-impossible object-decision test (Experiment 1), symmetric-asymmetric object-decision test (Experiment 2), and real-nonreal object-decision test (Experiment 3). In Experiments 1 and 2, young adults showed priming for unfamiliar objects at all delays, whereas older adults whose baseline task performance was similar to that of young adults did not show any priming. Experiment 3 found no effects of age or delay on priming of familiar objects; however, priming of unfamiliar objects was only observed in the young participants. This suggests that when older adults cannot rely on preexisting memory representations, age-related deficits in priming can emerge.
虽然对熟悉刺激的启动效应通常不随年龄变化，但对于衰老如何影响对实验前不熟悉刺激的启动效应却知之甚少。因此，本研究在基于组块的启动范式中，考察了衰老和编码至测试的延迟（0分钟、20分钟、90分钟和1周）对不熟悉物体启动效应的影响。在编码阶段，参与者观看新物体（实验1和2）或新物体与熟悉物体（实验3）的图片，并判断其左右方向。在测试组块中，使用可能-不可能物体判断测试（实验1）、对称-不对称物体判断测试（实验2）和真实-非真实物体判断测试（实验3）来测量启动效应。在实验1和2中，所有延迟条件下，年轻成年人对不熟悉物体均表现出启动效应，而基线任务表现与年轻成年人相似的老年人则未表现出任何启动效应。实验3发现年龄和延迟对熟悉物体的启动效应没有影响；然而，仅在年轻参与者中观察到对不熟悉物体的启动效应。这表明，当老年人无法依赖预先存在的记忆表征时，启动效应中与年龄相关的缺陷可能会出现。
