Heinrich Antje, Schneider Bruce A
University of Toronto at Mississauga, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada.
Q J Exp Psychol (Hove). 2011 Jan;64(1):186-205. doi: 10.1080/17470218.2010.492621. Epub 2010 Aug 5.
We investigated the effects of age, background babble, and acoustic distortion of the word itself on serial position memory in a series of experiments involving six different auditory environments (quiet, and 12-talker background babble presented between, overlapping, or concurrent with word presentation or with two kinds of distortion applied to the words). To control for hearing, the level of babble or distortion was adjusted so that younger and older adults could hear the words equally well. Although the presence of continuous and word-flanking background babble adversely affected memory in the early serial positions in both age groups, only older adults' memory was adversely affected in the later serial positions. Moreover, younger adults' memory was not affected by acoustic word distortion, whereas one of the two types of temporal distortion adversely affected memory for later serial positions in older adults. The exact pattern of impairment and its interaction with age suggests that memory in older adults is more affected than that in younger adults in complex listening situations because they either need more time or have to employ more attentional resources to segregate different auditory streams, thereby depleting the pool of resources available for memory encoding.
在一系列实验中，我们研究了年龄、背景杂音以及单词本身的声学失真对系列位置记忆的影响。这些实验涉及六种不同的听觉环境（安静环境，以及在单词呈现期间、与单词呈现重叠或同时呈现的12人背景杂音，或者对单词应用两种失真情况）。为了控制听力因素，调整了杂音或失真的水平，以便年轻和年长的成年人都能同样清楚地听到单词。尽管持续的和位于单词两侧的背景杂音对两个年龄组早期系列位置的记忆都有不利影响，但只有年长成年人后期系列位置的记忆受到了不利影响。此外，年轻成年人的记忆不受单词声学失真的影响，而两种时间失真类型中的一种对年长成年人后期系列位置的记忆有不利影响。损伤的确切模式及其与年龄的相互作用表明，在复杂的听力情境中，年长成年人的记忆比年轻成年人更容易受到影响，因为他们要么需要更多时间，要么必须动用更多注意力资源来分离不同的听觉流，从而耗尽了可用于记忆编码的资源池。
