Bennett Christopher R, Loomis Jack M, Klatzky Roberta L, Giudice Nicholas A
The Laboratory for Visual Neuroplasticity, Department of Ophthalmology, Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA.
Virtual Environments and Multimodal Interaction (VEMI) Laboratory, The University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA.
Mem Cognit. 2017 Oct;45(7):1240-1251. doi: 10.3758/s13421-017-0725-0.
When walking without vision, people mentally keep track of the directions and distances of previously viewed objects, a process called spatial updating. The current experiment indicates that while people across a large age range are able to update multiple targets in memory without perceptual support, aging negatively affects accuracy, precision, and decision time. Participants (20 to 80 years of age) viewed one, three, or six targets (colored lights) on the floor of a dimly lit room. Then, without vision, they walked to a target designated by color, either directly or indirectly (via a forward turning point). The younger adults' final stopping points were both accurate (near target) and precise (narrowly dispersed), but updating performance did degrade slightly with the number of targets. Older adults' performance was consistently worse than the younger group, but the lack of interaction between age and memory load indicates that the effect of age on performance was not further exacerbated by a greater number of targets. The number of targets also significantly increased the latency required to turn toward the designated target for both age groups. Taken together, results extend previous work showing impressive updating performance by younger adults, with novel findings showing that older adults manifest small but consistent degradation of updating performance of multitarget arrays.
在没有视觉引导的情况下行走时，人们会在脑海中记录之前看到的物体的方向和距离，这一过程称为空间更新。当前的实验表明，虽然各个年龄段的人都能够在没有感知支持的情况下在记忆中更新多个目标，但衰老会对准确性、精确性和决策时间产生负面影响。参与者（年龄在20至80岁之间）在一个光线昏暗的房间的地板上观看了一个、三个或六个目标（彩色灯光）。然后，在没有视觉的情况下，他们直接或间接地（通过一个向前的转折点）走向一个由颜色指定的目标。较年轻的成年人的最终停止点既准确（靠近目标）又精确（分散范围窄），但随着目标数量的增加，更新表现确实略有下降。老年人的表现始终比年轻组差，但年龄与记忆负荷之间缺乏交互作用表明，目标数量增加并不会进一步加剧年龄对表现的影响。目标数量也显著增加了两个年龄组转向指定目标所需的延迟时间。综上所述，研究结果扩展了之前关于较年轻成年人表现出令人印象深刻的更新能力的研究，同时有新的发现表明，老年人在多目标阵列的更新表现上有虽小但持续的下降。
