Volen National Center for Complex Systems, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts 02454-9110, USA.
Psychophysiology. 2010 May 1;47(3):560-9. doi: 10.1111/j.1469-8986.2009.00947.x. Epub 2010 Jan 11.
Two experiments examined the effectiveness of the pupillary response as a measure of cognitive load in younger and older adults. Experiment 1 measured the change in pupil size of younger and older adults while they listened to spoken digit lists that varied in length and retained them briefly for recall. In Experiment 2 changes in relative pupil size were measured while younger and older adults listened to sentences for later recall that varied in syntactic complexity and sentence length. Both age groups' pupil sizes were sensitive to the size of the memory set in Experiment 1 and sentence length in Experiment 2, with the older adults showing a larger effect of the memory load on a normalized measure of pupil size relative to the younger adults. By contrast, only the younger adults showed a difference in the pupillary response to a change in syntactic complexity, even with an adjustment for the reduced reactivity of the older pupil.
两项实验检验了瞳孔反应作为衡量年轻和年长成年人认知负荷的有效性。实验 1 测量了年轻人和老年人在听数字列表时瞳孔大小的变化，这些列表的长度不同，需要短暂保留以便回忆。在实验 2 中，当年轻人和老年人听句子以备稍后回忆时，测量相对瞳孔大小的变化，这些句子的句法复杂度和句子长度不同。两个年龄组的瞳孔大小都对实验 1 中记忆集的大小和实验 2 中句子长度敏感，与年轻人相比，老年人在归一化的瞳孔大小测量中对记忆负荷的影响更大。相比之下，只有年轻人在瞳孔对句法复杂度变化的反应中表现出差异，即使对老年人瞳孔反应性降低进行了调整也是如此。
