Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, and US Army Research Laboratory, Aberdeen Proving Ground, MD 21005, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2011 Mar;26(1):111-26. doi: 10.1037/a0020816.
Young and older adults studied word pairs and later discriminated studied pairs from various types of foils including recombined word-pairs and foil pairs containing one or two previously unstudied words. We manipulated how many times a specific word pair was repeated (1 or 5) and how many different words were associated with a given word (1 or 5) to tease apart the effects of item familiarity from recollection of the association. Rather than making simple old/new judgments, subjects chose one of five responses: (a) Old-Old (original), (b) Old-Old (rearranged), (c) Old-New, (d) New-Old, (e) New-New. Veridical recollection was impaired in old age in all memory conditions. There was evidence for a higher rate of false recollection of rearranged pairs following exact repetition of study pairs in older but not younger adults. In contrast, older adults were not more susceptible to interference than young adults when one or both words of the pair had multiple competing associates. Older adults were just as able as young adults to use item familiarity to recognize which word of a foil was old. This pattern suggests that recollection problems in advanced age are because of a deficit in older adults' formation or retrieval of new associations in memory. A modeling simulation provided good fits to these data and offers a mechanistic explanation based on an age-related reduction of working memory.
年轻人和老年人学习了单词对，然后从各种类型的干扰项中辨别出学习过的单词对，包括重新组合的单词对和包含一个或两个以前未学习过的单词的干扰项。我们操纵了特定单词对重复的次数（1 次或 5 次）和与给定单词相关联的不同单词的数量（1 个或 5 个），以区分项目熟悉度和联想的回忆。受试者不是做出简单的旧/新判断，而是从五个选项中选择一个：（a）Old-Old（原始），（b）Old-Old（重新排列），（c）Old-New，（d）New-Old，（e）New-New。在所有记忆条件下，老年人的真实回忆都随着年龄的增长而受损。在老年人中，在研究对重复的情况下，存在更高的排列对虚假回忆的证据，但在年轻人中则没有。相比之下，当一对单词中的一个或两个都有多个竞争的关联时，老年人并不比年轻人更容易受到干扰。老年人和年轻人一样能够使用项目熟悉度来识别干扰项中哪个单词是旧的。这种模式表明，老年人在高级阶段的回忆问题是由于他们在记忆中形成或检索新联想的能力不足。一个建模模拟很好地拟合了这些数据，并提供了一个基于与年龄相关的工作记忆减少的机制解释。
