Rabi Rahel, Minda John Paul
Department of Psychology, University of Western Ontario.
Psychol Aging. 2017 Nov;32(7):654-674. doi: 10.1037/pag0000190. Epub 2017 Sep 28.
Being able to categorize promotes cognitive economy by reducing the amount of information that an individual needs to remember. This ability is particularly important in older adulthood, when executive functioning abilities are known to decline. Prior research has shown that older adults can learn simple categories quite well but struggle when learning more complex categories which place a demand on executive function resources. The goal of Experiments 1 to 3 was to assess whether familiarizing older adults with complex rule-based or non-rule-based categories prior to beginning a categorization task would minimize age-related categorization deficits. Both rule-based and non-rule-based category learning improved among older adults following pretraining, but the improvements to rule-based learning were more drastic, suggesting that executive functioning plays a heavier role in rule-based category learning. Findings provide a potential solution for improving the category learning abilities of older adults. (PsycINFO Database Record
能够进行分类通过减少个体需要记忆的信息量来促进认知经济。这种能力在老年时期尤为重要，因为已知执行功能能力会在这个阶段下降。先前的研究表明，老年人能够很好地学习简单的类别，但在学习对执行功能资源有要求的更复杂类别时会遇到困难。实验1至3的目的是评估在开始分类任务之前让老年人熟悉基于规则或非基于规则的复杂类别是否能最大限度地减少与年龄相关的分类缺陷。经过预训练后，老年人在基于规则和非基于规则的类别学习方面都有所改善，但基于规则学习的改善更为显著，这表明执行功能在基于规则的类别学习中发挥着更重要的作用。研究结果为提高老年人的类别学习能力提供了一个潜在的解决方案。（PsycINFO数据库记录）
