Department of Developmental Psychology, University of Ulm, Ulm, Germany.
Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2013;20(2):195-219. doi: 10.1080/13825585.2012.690364. Epub 2012 Jun 14.
The goal of the present study was to examine whether individual differences in basic cognitive abilities, processing speed, and working memory, are reliable predictors of individual differences in forgetting rates in old age. The sample for the present study comprised 364 participants aged between 65 and 80 years from the Zurich Longitudinal Study on Cognitive Aging. The impact of basic cognitive abilities on forgetting was analyzed by modeling working memory and processing speed as predictors of the amount of forgetting of 27 words, which had been learned across five trials. Forgetting was measured over a 30-minute interval by using parceling and a latent change model, in which the latent difference between recall performance after five learning trials and a delayed recall was modeled. Results implied reliable individual differences in forgetting. These individual differences in forgetting were strongly related to processing speed and working memory. Moreover, an age-related effect, which was significantly stronger for forgetting than for learning, emerged even after controlling effects of processing speed and working memory.
本研究旨在考察基本认知能力、加工速度和工作记忆个体差异是否能可靠预测老年人遗忘率的个体差异。本研究的样本包括来自苏黎世认知老化纵向研究的 364 名年龄在 65 至 80 岁之间的参与者。通过将工作记忆和加工速度建模为遗忘量（27 个单词在五个试验中的遗忘量）的预测指标，分析了基本认知能力对遗忘的影响。通过分段和潜在变化模型，在 30 分钟的间隔内测量遗忘，在该模型中，将五个学习试验后的回忆表现与延迟回忆之间的潜在差异建模。结果表明遗忘存在可靠的个体差异。这些遗忘的个体差异与加工速度和工作记忆密切相关。此外，即使在控制了加工速度和工作记忆的影响后，仍出现了与年龄相关的效应，该效应在遗忘方面比在学习方面更为明显。
