Department of Psychology, University of Essex, Colchester, UK.
Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Ann N Y Acad Sci. 2018 Jul;1424(1):175-189. doi: 10.1111/nyas.13623. Epub 2018 Apr 10.
Impairments in refreshing have been suggested as one source of working memory (WM) deficits in older age. Retro-cues provide an important method of investigating this question: a retro-cue guides attention to one WM item, thereby arguably refreshing it and increasing its accessibility compared with a no-cue baseline. In contrast to the refreshing deficit hypothesis, intact retro-cue benefits have been found in older adults. Refreshing, however, is assumed to boost not one but several WM representations when sequentially applied to them. Hence, intact refreshing requires the flexible switching of attention among WM items. So far, it remains an open question whether older adults show this flexibility. Here, we investigated whether older adults can use multiple cues to sequentially refresh WM representations. Younger and older adults completed a continuous-color delayed-estimation task, in which the number of retro-cues (0, 1, or 2) presented during the retention interval was manipulated. The results showed a similar retro-cue benefit for younger and older adults, even in the two-cue condition in which participants had to switch attention between items to refresh representations in WM. These findings suggest that the capacity to use cues to refresh information in visual WM may be preserved with age.
刷新缺陷被认为是老年人工作记忆 (WM) 缺陷的一个来源。回溯提示提供了一种重要的方法来研究这个问题：回溯提示将注意力引导到一个 WM 项目上，从而可以说刷新了它，并使其与无提示基线相比更易于访问。与刷新缺陷假说相反，老年人的回溯提示仍然有益。然而，刷新被认为在依次应用于它们时会增强而不是一个 WM 表示。因此，灵活地在 WM 项目之间切换注意力是刷新所必需的。到目前为止，老年人是否具有这种灵活性仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。在这里，我们研究了老年人是否可以使用多个提示来依次刷新 WM 表示。年轻和年长的参与者完成了一个连续颜色延迟估计任务，在该任务中，在保留间隔期间呈现的回溯提示（0、1 或 2）的数量被操纵。结果表明，即使在参与者必须在项目之间切换注意力以刷新 WM 中的表示的双提示条件下，年轻和年长的参与者的回溯提示也具有相似的益处。这些发现表明，使用提示在视觉 WM 中刷新信息的能力可能会随着年龄的增长而保持。
