a Department of Neuroscience , McGill University , Montreal , QC , Canada.
Memory. 2013;21(7):818-31. doi: 10.1080/09658211.2012.761714. Epub 2013 Jan 30.
During the performance of cognitive tasks such as memory encoding, attention can become decoupled from the external environment and instead focused on internal thoughts related to the appraisal of the current task (task-related interferences; TRI), or personal thoughts unrelated to the task at hand (mind-wandering; MW). However, the association between the frequency of these thoughts experienced at encoding and retrieval accuracy in young and older adults remains poorly understood. In this study young and older adults encoded lists of words using one of two encoding tasks: judging whether words are man-made/natural (objective task), or whether they are pleasant/neutral (subjective task). We measured the frequency of TRI and MW at encoding, and related them to retrieval accuracy in both age groups. We found that encoding task influenced the type of internal thoughts experienced by young, but not older, adults: young exhibited greater MW in the subjective vs the objective task, and greater TRI in the objective vs subjective encoding task. Second, across both tasks we found marked age-related decreases in both MW and TRI at encoding, and frequency of these thoughts negatively impacted memory retrieval in young adults only. We discuss these findings in relation to current theories of ageing, attention and memory.
在执行认知任务（如记忆编码）时，注意力可能会与外部环境分离，转而专注于与当前任务评估相关的内部想法（与任务相关的干扰；TRI），或者与手头任务无关的个人想法（思维漫游；MW）。然而，在年轻人和老年人中，这些在编码时经历的想法的频率与检索准确性之间的关联仍知之甚少。在这项研究中，年轻人和老年人使用两种编码任务之一来对单词列表进行编码：判断单词是人造的/自然的（客观任务），还是令人愉快/中性的（主观任务）。我们测量了编码时的 TRI 和 MW 的频率，并将其与两个年龄组的检索准确性相关联。我们发现，编码任务影响了年轻人经历的内部想法的类型，但对老年人没有影响：年轻人在主观任务中表现出更大的 MW，而在客观任务中则表现出更大的 TRI。其次，在两个任务中，我们都发现 MW 和 TRI 在编码时都有明显的与年龄相关的下降，而这些想法的频率仅对年轻人的记忆检索产生负面影响。我们根据当前的衰老、注意力和记忆理论讨论了这些发现。
