Verwey Willem B
Cognitive Psychology and Ergonomics, Faculty of Behavioral Sciences, University of Twente, 7500 AE Enschede, The Netherlands.
Acta Psychol (Amst). 2010 Jun;134(2):206-14. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2010.02.001. Epub 2010 Mar 1.
The present study examined whether elderly use motor chunks after practicing discrete keying sequences, just like young adults, or whether they perhaps learn these movement patterns in a different way. To that end, elderly (75-88) and young adults (18-28) practiced as part of the discrete sequence production (DSP) task two fixed series of three and six key presses. The results demonstrate that elderly did improve with practice but this improvement was largely sequence-unspecific. Detailed analyses showed that, in contrast to young adults, most elderly did not use motor chunks, had little explicit sequence knowledge, and remained highly dependent on external stimuli. Still, elderly did show sequence-specific learning with a 6-key sequence that can be explained by an associative learning mechanism.
本研究探讨了老年人在练习离散按键序列后是否会像年轻人一样使用运动组块，或者他们是否可能以不同的方式学习这些运动模式。为此，老年人（75 - 88岁）和年轻人（18 - 28岁）作为离散序列生成（DSP）任务的一部分，练习了两个固定的由三次和六次按键组成的序列。结果表明，老年人确实通过练习得到了改善，但这种改善在很大程度上与序列无关。详细分析表明，与年轻人不同，大多数老年人不使用运动组块，几乎没有明确的序列知识，并且仍然高度依赖外部刺激。尽管如此，老年人在六键序列上确实表现出了序列特异性学习，这可以通过联想学习机制来解释。
