Department of Experimental Psychology, University of Granada, Granada, Spain.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2012 Jan;38(1):178-86. doi: 10.1037/a0024510. Epub 2011 Jul 18.
Although memory inhibition seems to underlie retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF), there is some controversy about the precise nature of this effect. Because normal RIF is observed in people with deficits in executive control (i.e., older adults), some have proposed that an automatic-like inhibitory process is responsible for the effect. On the contrary, neurocognitive and dual-task findings with young people support the view that an executive control process underlies RIF. In the present study, we address this apparent controversy by comparing young and older participants under different dual-task conditions. Our results indicate that memory inhibition in older adults also depends on executive control, which is more easily disrupted by a secondary task in older than in young adults. Thus, the fact that RIF in older adults is sometimes present is not incompatible with a decline in executive control with aging. The results also shed some light into the discussion regarding the effect of dual tasking on retrieval.
尽管记忆抑制似乎是检索诱发遗忘（RIF）的基础，但关于这种效应的确切性质仍存在一些争议。由于在执行控制受损的人群（即老年人）中观察到正常的 RIF，因此有人提出，自动抑制过程是造成这种效应的原因。相反，年轻人的神经认知和双任务研究结果支持这样一种观点，即执行控制过程是 RIF 的基础。在本研究中，我们通过比较不同双任务条件下的年轻和老年参与者来解决这一明显的争议。我们的结果表明，老年人的记忆抑制也依赖于执行控制，而执行控制在老年人中比在年轻人中更容易受到次要任务的干扰。因此，老年人中有时存在 RIF 的事实并不与衰老导致的执行控制下降相矛盾。研究结果还为关于双任务对检索的影响的讨论提供了一些启示。
