Hernandez-Ramos E, Cansino S
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico. Facultad de Psicologia, Mexico DF, Mexico.
Rev Neurol. 2011 Feb 1;52(3):147-53.
Although there is agreement that working memory in older adults diminished with age, there is still controversy whether this reduction occurs equally for all kind of information or it is more pronounced for a particular type of information.
To compare verbal working memory with visual and spatial working memory in young and older adults. These comparisons were examined at two levels of complexity.
Two experiments were conducted, in one of them subjects performed the verbal and visual tasks, and in the other the verbal and spatial tasks. Forty-two subjects participated in each experiment: 21 young adults and 21 older adults. The n-back task (1-back and 2-back) was used with letters, abstract figures and circles at different positions to evaluate verbal, visual and spatial working memory, respectively.
Older adults performed lower than young adults in the visual and spatial high difficult tasks. Working memory efficiency in the verbal task was equivalent in both groups, independently of the level of complexity; however, older adults' accuracy was lower in high complexity verbal task relative to the low complexity task.
The findings suggest that working memory deficits during aging do not depend on the type of information but on the amount of resources from the memory system that each type of information requires to be processed.
尽管人们一致认为老年人的工作记忆会随着年龄增长而减退，但对于这种减退是否在所有类型的信息中同等发生，或者对于某一特定类型的信息更为明显，仍存在争议。
比较年轻人和老年人的言语工作记忆与视觉和空间工作记忆。这些比较在两个复杂程度水平上进行。
进行了两项实验，其中一项实验中受试者执行言语和视觉任务，另一项实验中受试者执行言语和空间任务。每项实验有42名受试者参与：21名年轻人和21名老年人。采用n-back任务（1-back和2-back），分别使用字母、抽象图形和不同位置的圆圈来评估言语、视觉和空间工作记忆。
在视觉和空间高难度任务中，老年人的表现低于年轻人。在言语任务中，两组的工作记忆效率相当，与复杂程度无关；然而，在高复杂程度言语任务中，老年人的准确性相对于低复杂程度任务更低。
研究结果表明，衰老过程中的工作记忆缺陷并不取决于信息类型，而是取决于每种信息处理所需的记忆系统资源量。
