Smith Rebekah E, Hunt R Reed
a Department of Psychology , The University of Texas at San Antonio , San Antonio , TX , USA.
Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2014;21(4):411-31. doi: 10.1080/13825585.2013.827150. Epub 2013 Aug 15.
Remembering to perform an action in the future, called prospective memory, often shows age-related differences in favor of young adults when tested in the laboratory. Recently Smith, Horn, and Bayen (2012; Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 19, 495) embedded a PM task in an ongoing color-matching task and manipulated the difficulty of the ongoing task by varying the number of colors on each trial of the task. Smith et al. found that age-related differences in PM performance (lower PM performance for older adults relative to young adults) persisted even when older adults could perform the ongoing task as well or better than the young adults. The current study investigates a possible explanation for the pattern of results reported by Smith et al. by including a manipulation of task emphasis: for half of the participants the prospective memory task was emphasize, while for the other half the ongoing color-matching task was emphasized. Older adults performed a 4-color version of the ongoing color-matching task, while young adults completed either the 4-color or a more difficult 6-color version of the ongoing task. Older adults failed to perform as well as the young adults on the prospective memory task regardless of task emphasis, even when older adults were performing as well or better than the young adults on the ongoing color-matching task. The current results indicate that the lack of an effect of ongoing task load on prospective memory task performance is not due to a perception that one or the other task is more important than the other.
记住在未来执行某个动作，即前瞻记忆，在实验室测试中，通常会表现出与年龄相关的差异，年轻人在这方面更具优势。最近，史密斯、霍恩和贝扬（2012年；《衰老、神经心理学与认知》，第19卷，第495页）将一项前瞻记忆任务嵌入到一个正在进行的颜色匹配任务中，并通过改变任务每次试验中的颜色数量来操纵正在进行的任务的难度。史密斯等人发现，即使老年人在进行中的任务上表现得和年轻人一样好甚至更好，前瞻记忆表现方面与年龄相关的差异（老年人相对于年轻人的前瞻记忆表现较低）仍然存在。本研究通过对任务重点进行操纵，来探究史密斯等人报告的结果模式的一种可能解释：对于一半的参与者，强调前瞻记忆任务，而对于另一半参与者，强调正在进行的颜色匹配任务。老年人进行4色版本的正在进行的颜色匹配任务，而年轻人则完成4色或更难的6色版本的正在进行的任务。无论任务重点如何，老年人在前瞻记忆任务上的表现都不如年轻人，即使老年人在正在进行的颜色匹配任务上表现得和年轻人一样好甚至更好。目前的结果表明，正在进行的任务负荷对前瞻记忆任务表现缺乏影响，并非是因为认为其中一项任务比另一项任务更重要。
