Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9JZ, Scotland, United Kingdom.
Psychol Aging. 2010 Mar;25(1):219-28. doi: 10.1037/a0017750.
We examined the association between 5 processing speed measures and general cognitive ability in a large (>900) sample of relatively healthy men and women at age 70. The processing speed tests were the Wechsler Digit Symbol-Coding and Symbol Search, simple reaction time, 4-choice reaction time, and inspection time. To inquire whether the processing speed tasks might be biomarkers of cognitive aging, we examined the attenuations in their associations with general cognitive ability after adjusting for cognitive ability measured almost 60 years earlier. With the exception of inspection time, the attenuations were substantial. Inspection time was the only processing speed measure--all of which were measured at age 70--whose correlation with cognitive ability at age 70 was significantly greater than the correlation with cognitive ability at age 11. In old age, individual differences in most commonly used measures of processing speed are largely dependent on childhood cognitive ability. For all processing speed tasks, a little variance is left that appears to be related to aging differences. Inspection time, the marker that was least dependent on childhood intelligence, should be considered further as one biomarker of cognitive aging.
我们在一个由相对健康的 70 岁男性和女性组成的大型 (>900 人)样本中，考察了 5 种处理速度测量指标与一般认知能力之间的关系。这些处理速度测试包括威斯康星卡片分类测试中的数字符号编码和符号搜索、简单反应时、4 选择反应时和检查时间。为了探究这些处理速度任务是否是认知老化的生物标志物，我们在调整了近 60 年前测量的认知能力后，考察了它们与一般认知能力的关联程度的衰减。除了检查时间外，所有处理速度指标的衰减都很明显。检查时间是唯一一个与 70 岁时的认知能力的相关性明显大于与 11 岁时认知能力相关性的处理速度测量指标。在老年时，大多数常用的处理速度测量指标的个体差异在很大程度上取决于儿童时期的认知能力。对于所有处理速度任务，仍然存在一些似乎与衰老差异有关的剩余方差。检查时间是最不依赖于儿童智力的指标，应该进一步考虑作为认知老化的生物标志物之一。
