Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Psychol Aging. 2011 Sep;26(3):678-88. doi: 10.1037/a0022326.
Healthy aging is often accompanied by episodic memory decline. Prior studies have consistently demonstrated that older adults show disproportionate deficits in relational memory (RM) relative to item memory (IM). Despite rich evidence of an age-related RM deficit, the source of this deficit remains unspecified. One of the most widely investigated factors of age-related RM impairment is a reduction in attentional resources. However, no prior studies have demonstrated that reduced attentional resources are the critical source of age-related RM deficits. Here, we used qualitatively different attention tasks and tested whether reduced attention for relational processing underlies the RM deficit observed in aging. In Experiment 1, we imposed either item-detection or relation-detection attention tasks on young adults during episodic memory encoding and found that only the concurrent attention task that involves relational processing disproportionately impaired RM performance in young adults. Moreover, by ruling out the possible confound of task difficulty on the disproportionate RM impairment, we further demonstrated that reduced relational attention is a key factor for the age-related RM deficit. In Experiment 2, we replicated the results from Experiment 1 by using different materials of stimuli and found that the effect of relational attention on RM is material general. The results of Experiment 2 also showed that reducing attentional resources for relational processing in young adults strikingly equated their RM performance to that of older adults. Thus, this study documents the first evidence that reduced attentional resources for relational processing are a critical factor for the relational memory impairment observed in aging.
健康的衰老过程通常伴随着情景记忆的衰退。先前的研究一致表明，老年人在关系记忆（RM）方面相对于项目记忆（IM）存在不成比例的缺陷。尽管有丰富的证据表明 RM 随年龄增长而下降，但这种缺陷的根源仍未确定。与年龄相关的 RM 损害最广泛研究的因素之一是注意力资源的减少。然而，先前的研究并未证明注意力资源的减少是与年龄相关的 RM 缺陷的关键来源。在这里，我们使用了性质不同的注意力任务，测试了注意力对关系处理的减少是否是衰老过程中观察到的 RM 缺陷的关键来源。在实验 1 中，我们在年轻人进行情景记忆编码时施加项目检测或关系检测注意力任务，发现只有涉及关系处理的并发注意力任务会不成比例地损害年轻人的 RM 表现。此外，通过排除任务难度对不成比例的 RM 损伤的可能混淆，我们进一步证明，减少关系注意力是与年龄相关的 RM 缺陷的关键因素。在实验 2 中，我们使用不同的刺激材料复制了实验 1 的结果，发现关系注意力对 RM 的影响具有材料普遍性。实验 2 的结果还表明，减少年轻人关系处理的注意力资源会使他们的 RM 表现与老年人的表现惊人地一致。因此，本研究首次证明，关系处理注意力资源的减少是衰老过程中观察到的关系记忆损伤的关键因素。
