Department of General Psychology, University of Padua, Padua, Italy.
Memory. 2012;20(1):14-27. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2011.628320. Epub 2011 Dec 2.
Memory updating is the ability to select and update relevant information and suppress no-longer-relevant data. The few studies in this area, targeting mainly the verbal domain, have investigated and confirmed an age-related decline in working memory updating ability (De Beni & Palladino, 2004; Van der Linden, Bredart, & Beerten, 1994). The present research examines the ability of younger and older adults to update information in verbal and visuo-spatial running memory tasks. Results showed that the participants' performance was higher in the verbal than in the visuo-spatial task. Nonetheless, independently of the task domain, an age-related decline in updating performance was found. Moreover, analysis of serial positions suggested that, in the updating procedure, the participants were not attempting to actively maintain items, preferring to adopt a low-effort, "recency-based" strategy. The use of this type of strategy is more evident in older participants, as shown in both the accuracy performance and the proportion of intrusion errors.
记忆更新是指选择和更新相关信息并抑制不再相关的数据的能力。该领域的少数研究主要针对言语领域，已经调查并证实了工作记忆更新能力随年龄增长而下降（De Beni & Palladino，2004；Van der Linden、Bredart 和 Beerten，1994）。本研究考察了年轻和年长成年人在言语和视空间运行记忆任务中更新信息的能力。结果表明，参与者在言语任务中的表现优于视空间任务。尽管如此，无论任务领域如何，都发现更新表现随年龄增长而下降。此外，序列位置的分析表明，在更新过程中，参与者并没有试图主动保持项目，而是倾向于采用低努力的“基于最新”策略。这种策略的使用在年长参与者中更为明显，这在准确性表现和入侵错误的比例中都有所体现。
