Weeks Jennifer C, Hasher Lynn
a Department of Psychology , University of Toronto , Toronto , ON , Canada.
b Psychology , Rotman Research Institute, Baycrest , Toronto , ON , Canada.
Neuropsychol Dev Cogn B Aging Neuropsychol Cogn. 2018 Jul;25(4):576-587. doi: 10.1080/13825585.2017.1353678. Epub 2017 Jul 13.
Previous work has shown that older adults attend to and implicitly remember more distracting information than young adults; however, it is unknown whether they show a corresponding decrease in implicit memory for targets in the presence of distracters. Using implicit memory tests, we asked whether older adults show a tradeoff in memory between targets and distracters. Here, young and older adults performed a selective attention task in which they were instructed to attend to target pictures and ignore superimposed distracter words. We measured priming for distracter words using fragment completion and for target pictures using naming time. Older adults showed greater priming for distracting words compared to young adults, but equivalent priming for target pictures. These results suggest that older adults have a broader attentional scope than young adults, encompassing both relevant and irrelevant information.
先前的研究表明，与年轻人相比，老年人会注意到并隐性记住更多干扰信息；然而，在存在干扰物的情况下，他们对目标的隐性记忆是否会相应下降尚不清楚。通过隐性记忆测试，我们探究了老年人在目标和干扰物的记忆方面是否存在权衡。在此，年轻人和老年人执行了一项选择性注意任务，他们被指示关注目标图片并忽略叠加的干扰词。我们使用片段完成任务测量干扰词的启动效应，使用命名时间测量目标图片的启动效应。与年轻人相比，老年人对干扰词的启动效应更大，但对目标图片的启动效应相当。这些结果表明，老年人比年轻人具有更广泛的注意范围，包括相关和不相关的信息。
