Center for Lifespan Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Lentzeallee 94, 14195 Berlin, Germany.
Psychol Aging. 2011 Sep;26(3):612-24. doi: 10.1037/a0023055.
Working memory (WM) shows a gradual increase during childhood, followed by accelerating decline from adulthood to old age. To examine these lifespan differences more closely, we asked 34 children (10-12 years), 40 younger adults (20-25 years), and 39 older adults (70-75 years) to perform a color change detection task. Load levels and encoding durations were varied for displays including targets only (Experiment 1) or targets plus distracters (Experiment 2, investigating a subsample of Experiment 1). WM performance was lower in older adults and children than in younger adults. Longer presentation times were associated with better performance in all age groups, presumably reflecting increasing effects of strategic selection mechanisms on WM performance. Children outperformed older adults when encoding times were short, and distracter effects were larger in children and older adults than in younger adults. We conclude that strategic selection in WM develops more slowly during childhood than basic binding operations, presumably reflecting the delay in maturation of frontal versus medio-temporal brain networks. In old age, both sets of mechanisms decline, reflecting senescent change in both networks. We discuss similarities to episodic memory development and address open questions for future research.
工作记忆（WM）在儿童时期逐渐增加，然后从成年期到老年期加速下降。为了更仔细地研究这些寿命差异，我们要求 34 名儿童（10-12 岁）、40 名年轻成年人（20-25 岁）和 39 名老年成年人（70-75 岁）执行颜色变化检测任务。在仅包括目标的显示（实验 1）或包括目标和干扰物的显示（实验 2，调查实验 1 的一个子样本）中，我们改变了负荷水平和编码持续时间。在所有年龄组中，较长的呈现时间与更好的表现相关，这可能反映了策略选择机制对 WM 表现的影响越来越大。当编码时间较短时，儿童的表现优于老年成年人，并且干扰物的影响在儿童和老年成年人中比在年轻成年人中更大。我们得出的结论是，与基本绑定操作相比，WM 中的策略选择在儿童时期的发展较慢，这可能反映了额叶与中颞叶大脑网络之间的成熟延迟。在老年期，这两种机制都下降，反映了两个网络的衰老变化。我们讨论了与情景记忆发展的相似之处，并为未来的研究提出了悬而未决的问题。
