Department of Experimental Psychology and Mind, Brain and Behavior Research Center, University of Granada.
Department of Psychology, University of Jaen.
Psychol Aging. 2014 Mar;29(1):128-39. doi: 10.1037/a0035598.
Aging is thought to involve a decline in executive-control capacities, although evidence regarding this claim is not always clear. Thus, although studies exist that suggest impoverished inhibitory memory control in older adults relative to younger adults, experiments with the list-method direct forgetting procedure have mostly failed to show adult-age differences in voluntary forgetting. In the present study we aimed to further study this issue by comparing young-old and young adults' performance with the selective directed forgetting (SDF) procedure, which we assumed to involve higher demands of executive control than the standard nonselective procedure. Thus, on the basis of previous studies showing that a critical factor in finding adult-age differences in executive-control tasks is the overall challenge posed by the tasks, we predicted less SDF in older adults than in younger adults. Supporting our hypothesis, across three experiments we show evidence of older adults' impoverished capacity to voluntarily forget episodic memories, although only when the task requires selective forgetting. Ours join other findings to suggest that sensitiveness to detect adult-age differences in cognitive control may strongly depend on the executive-control demands imposed by tasks.
衰老被认为涉及到执行控制能力的下降，尽管这一说法的证据并不总是很清楚。因此，尽管有研究表明老年人的抑制性记忆控制能力比年轻人差，但使用列表方法直接遗忘程序的实验大多未能显示出成年人在自愿遗忘方面的年龄差异。在本研究中，我们旨在通过比较年轻老年人和年轻人在选择性定向遗忘（SDF）程序上的表现来进一步研究这个问题，我们假设 SDF 程序比标准的非选择性程序更需要执行控制。因此，基于先前的研究表明，在执行控制任务中发现成人年龄差异的一个关键因素是任务带来的整体挑战，我们预测老年人的 SDF 会比年轻人少。我们的三个实验都支持了我们的假设，证明了老年人在自愿忘记情景记忆方面的能力较差，尽管只有当任务需要选择性遗忘时才会出现这种情况。我们的研究结果与其他研究结果一起表明，检测认知控制中成人年龄差异的敏感性可能强烈依赖于任务所施加的执行控制要求。
