Neurology/Neuropsychology CMRR Unit, CHU Nord, 42055 Saint Etienne Cedex 02, France.
Brain Cogn. 2011 Jun;76(1):20-5. doi: 10.1016/j.bandc.2011.03.008. Epub 2011 Apr 8.
The present study examines the prediction that emotion can facilitate short-term memory. Nevertheless, emotion also recruits attention to process information, thereby disrupting short-term memory when tasks involve high attentional resources. In this way, we aimed to determine whether there is a differential influence of emotional information on short-term memory in ageing and Alzheimer's disease (AD). Fourteen patients with mild AD, 14 healthy older participants (NC), and 14 younger adults (YA) performed two tasks. In the first task, involving visual short-term memory, participants were asked to remember a picture among four different pictures (negative or neutral) following a brief delay. The second task, a binding memory task, required the recognition by participants of a picture according to its spatial location. The attentional cost involved was higher than for the first task. The pattern of results showed that visual memory performance was better for negative stimuli than for neutral ones, irrespective of the group. In contrast, binding memory performance was essentially poorer for the location of negative pictures in the NC group, and for the location of both negative and neutral stimuli in the AD group, in comparison to the YA group. Taken together, these results show that emotion has beneficial effects on visual short-term memory in ageing and AD. In contrast, emotion does not improve their performances in the binding condition.
本研究考察了情绪是否能促进短期记忆的预测。然而，情绪也会引起注意力，从而在任务涉及高注意力资源时干扰短期记忆。通过这种方式，我们旨在确定情绪信息对衰老和阿尔茨海默病（AD）患者短期记忆的影响是否存在差异。14 名轻度 AD 患者、14 名健康老年人（NC）和 14 名年轻人（YA）参加了两个任务。在第一个任务中，涉及视觉短期记忆，要求参与者在短暂延迟后从四张不同的图片（负面或中性）中记住一张图片。第二个任务是绑定记忆任务，要求参与者根据图片的空间位置识别图片。第二个任务的注意力成本高于第一个任务。结果表明，无论组别如何，负性刺激的视觉记忆表现均优于中性刺激。相比之下，NC 组中负性图片的位置以及 AD 组中负性和中性刺激的位置的绑定记忆表现都明显较差，与 YA 组相比。总之，这些结果表明，情绪对衰老和 AD 患者的视觉短期记忆有有益的影响。相反，情绪并不能改善他们在绑定条件下的表现。
