Division of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Department of Psychology, Rice University.
Psychol Aging. 2014 Jun;29(2):187-204. doi: 10.1037/a0036085.
The present study tested the hypothesis that older adults show age-related deficits in interference resolution, also referred to as inhibitory control. Although oftentimes considered as a unitary aspect of executive function, various lines of work support the notion that interference resolution may be better understood as multiple constructs, including resistance to proactive interference (PI) and response-distractor inhibition (e.g., Friedman & Miyake, 2004). Using this dichotomy, the present study assessed whether older adults (relative to younger adults) show impaired performance across both, 1, or neither of these interference resolution constructs. To do so, we used multiple tasks to tap each construct and examined age effects at both the single task and latent variable levels. Older adults consistently demonstrated exaggerated interference effects across resistance to PI tasks. Although the results for the response-distractor inhibition tasks were less consistent at the individual task level analyses, age effects were evident on multiple tasks, as well as at the latent variable level. However, results of the latent variable modeling suggested declines in interference resolution are best explained by variance that is common to the 2 interference resolution constructs measured herein. Furthermore, the effect of age on interference resolution was found to be both distinct from declines in working memory, and independent of processing speed. These findings suggest multiple cognitive domains are independently sensitive to age, but that declines in the interference resolution constructs measured herein may originate from a common cause.
本研究检验了一个假设，即老年人在干扰解决方面表现出与年龄相关的缺陷，也称为抑制控制。尽管干扰解决通常被认为是执行功能的一个统一方面，但各种研究支持这样一种观点，即干扰解决可以更好地理解为多个结构，包括对前摄干扰（PI）的抵抗和对反应-干扰抑制的抑制（例如，Friedman & Miyake，2004）。使用这种二分法，本研究评估了老年人（相对于年轻人）在这两个、一个或都没有这些干扰解决结构中表现出的受损表现。为此，我们使用多种任务来挖掘每个结构，并在单一任务和潜在变量水平上检查年龄效应。老年人在抵抗 PI 任务中表现出明显的干扰效应。虽然在个别任务水平分析中，反应-干扰抑制任务的结果不太一致，但在多个任务以及潜在变量水平上都存在年龄效应。然而，潜在变量建模的结果表明，干扰解决的下降可以通过本文中测量的两个干扰解决结构共有的方差来最好地解释。此外，干扰解决的年龄效应既与工作记忆的下降不同，也与处理速度无关。这些发现表明，多个认知领域对年龄都有独立的敏感性，但本文中测量的干扰解决结构的下降可能源于共同的原因。
