Rapp P R
Salk Institute for Biological Studies, San Diego, California 92138.
Behav Neurosci. 1990 Dec;104(6):876-84. doi: 10.1037//0735-7044.104.6.876.
Visual discrimination and reversal learning were assessed in young adult (10-12 years old, n = 4) and aged (23-27 years old, n = 5) female rhesus monkeys. Performance was comparable across age groups in many tasks, suggesting that the acquisition of stimulus-reward associations remains largely intact in the aged monkey. Most older subjects, however, required more training than any young animal to learn an initial pattern discrimination. In combination with previous findings from the same groups of monkeys, these data suggest that deficits in attending to the relevant stimulus features in novel testing procedures may contribute to poor performance in aged subjects across a variety of learning and memory tasks. In addition, preliminary findings from a discrimination probe procedure raise the possibility that aged subjects may adopt alternate testing strategies that compensate for some aspects of age-dependent cognitive dysfunction.
对年轻成年（10 - 12岁，n = 4）和老年（23 - 27岁，n = 5）雌性恒河猴进行了视觉辨别和反转学习评估。在许多任务中，各年龄组的表现相当，这表明老年猴子中刺激 - 奖励关联的习得在很大程度上仍然完好无损。然而，大多数老年受试动物比任何年轻动物都需要更多训练才能学会初始的模式辨别。结合来自同一组猴子的先前研究结果，这些数据表明，在新颖测试程序中关注相关刺激特征方面的缺陷可能导致老年受试动物在各种学习和记忆任务中表现不佳。此外，辨别探测程序的初步研究结果增加了一种可能性，即老年受试动物可能采用替代测试策略来补偿年龄依赖性认知功能障碍的某些方面。
