Busey Thomas, Craig James, Clark Chris, Humes Larry
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University, Bloomington, IN 47405, United States.
Vision Res. 2010 Aug 6;50(17):1628-40. doi: 10.1016/j.visres.2010.05.003. Epub 2010 May 16.
Five measures of temporal order judgments were obtained from 261 participants, including 146 elder, 44 middle aged, and 71 young participants. Strong age group differences were observed in all five measures, although the group differences were reduced when letter discriminability was matched for all participants. Significant relations were found between these measures of temporal processing and several cognitive and sensory assays, and structural equation modeling revealed the degree to which temporal order processing can be viewed as a latent factor that depends in part on contributions from sensory and cognitive capacities. The best-fitting model involved two different latent factors representing temporal order processing at same and different locations, and the sensory and cognitive factors were more successful predicting performance in the different location factor than the same-location factor. Processing speed, even measured using high-contrast symbols on a paper-and-pencil test, was a surprisingly strong predictor of variability in both latent factors. However, low-level sensory measures also made significant contributions to the latent factors. The results demonstrate the degree to which temporal order processing relates to other perceptual and cognitive capacities, and address the question of whether age-related declines in these capacities share a common cause.
从261名参与者那里获得了五项时间顺序判断指标，其中包括146名老年人、44名中年人以及71名年轻人。在所有这五项指标中均观察到了明显的年龄组差异，不过当为所有参与者匹配字母可辨别性时，组间差异有所减小。在这些时间处理指标与若干认知和感官测定之间发现了显著关系，结构方程模型揭示了时间顺序处理在多大程度上可被视为一个潜在因素，该因素部分取决于感官和认知能力的贡献。最佳拟合模型涉及两个不同的潜在因素，分别代表相同位置和不同位置的时间顺序处理，并且感官和认知因素在预测不同位置因素的表现方面比相同位置因素更为成功。即使是在纸笔测试中使用高对比度符号来测量，处理速度仍是这两个潜在因素变异性的一个惊人强大的预测指标。然而，低水平的感官测量对潜在因素也有显著贡献。研究结果证明了时间顺序处理与其他感知和认知能力相关的程度，并解决了这些能力中与年龄相关的衰退是否有共同原因这一问题。
