University of Waterloo Waterloo, ON, Canada.
Front Psychol. 2013 Mar 1;4:99. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00099. eCollection 2013.
Although objective measures of memory performance typically indicate memory declines with age, self-reported memory failures often show no relation to age. In contrast, self-reported attention failures are reliably negatively correlated with age. This contrast suggests the possibility that age-related awareness and reporting of memory failures might be masked by a concurrent decrease in attention failures, which would reduce encoding failures with age and hence reduce perceived memory failures. Self-reported problems of attention and memory were evaluated in two samples with the ages spanning eight decades. Initial analysis indicated that attention failures significantly decreased with age, whereas memory problems did not to differ across age. The association of self-reported memory failures became significantly positive, however, when residualized on attention lapses. In contrast, the correlation between attention lapses and age was modestly affected when memory failures were controlled. These results highlight the close relation of attention lapses and memory problems and, beyond the implications of individual differences in attention for memory research, suggest the advisability of assessing attention failures for a full evaluation of memory problems.
虽然记忆表现的客观测量通常表明记忆力随年龄增长而下降，但自我报告的记忆失败通常与年龄无关。相比之下，自我报告的注意力失败与年龄呈可靠的负相关。这种对比表明，与年龄相关的记忆失败的意识和报告可能被注意力失败的同时下降所掩盖，这将随着年龄的增长减少编码失败，从而减少感知到的记忆失败。在两个跨越八个十年的样本中，使用自我报告评估了注意力和记忆问题。初步分析表明，注意力失败随年龄显著下降，而记忆问题在不同年龄之间没有差异。然而，当注意力失误被残差化时，自我报告的记忆失败的关联变得显著为正。相比之下，当控制记忆失败时，注意力失误和年龄之间的相关性受到适度影响。这些结果突出了注意力失误和记忆问题的密切关系，除了个体差异对记忆研究的影响外，还表明评估注意力失误对于全面评估记忆问题是明智的。
