Ebaid Deena, Crewther Sheila G
Department of Psychology and Counselling, School of Psychology and Public Health, La Trobe University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Front Aging Neurosci. 2018 Nov 6;10:352. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2018.00352. eCollection 2018.
Cognitive abilities are often reported to decline across the lifespan, particularly when assessed with working memory (WM) measures such as the auditory backward digit span and complex back tasks. However, some debate still exists regarding which aspects of cognition are most susceptible to the aging process and which may remain intact. Additionally, time estimation, though a complex psychological dimension, is often studied in relative isolation and is particularly neglected in traditional studies of WM, with little research from the viewpoint of retrospective temporal estimation. In particular, research seldom considers whether the ability to accurately estimate time retrospectively, is correlated with performance on traditional memory and processing speed measures in healthy populations. Thus, we chose to investigate performance of comparably educated young and older adult groups on both classical memory tasks including auditory and visual digit spans, -back, Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS)-based measures of processing speed (i.e., Symbol Search [SS] and Coding [Cod]) and a temporal measure of WM with a focus on retrospective time estimation. Our sample included 66 university students (58 F, 8 M) between the ages of 18-29, and 33 university-educated healthy older adults (25 F, 8 M) between the ages of 60-81. Results indicated that older adults performed significantly worse on auditory but not the visual digit span tasks, as well as on both the SS and Cod, though performed equally well on the = 1 back task. Results also showed that retrospective time estimation was not significantly different between young and older adults, with both groups substantially underestimating duration of a simple task. Retrospective time estimation was not significantly correlated to any memory or processing speed measure, emphasizing the need for future research into the specific cognitive domains underlying the subjective estimation of a temporal interval.
认知能力通常被报道在整个生命周期中会下降，尤其是在通过工作记忆（WM）测量方法进行评估时，如听觉倒序数字广度和复杂的反向任务。然而，关于认知的哪些方面最容易受到衰老过程的影响以及哪些方面可能保持完好，仍然存在一些争议。此外，时间估计虽然是一个复杂的心理维度，但通常是在相对孤立的情况下进行研究，并且在传统的WM研究中尤其被忽视，从回顾性时间估计的角度进行的研究很少。特别是，研究很少考虑在健康人群中，准确进行回顾性时间估计的能力是否与传统记忆和处理速度测量的表现相关。因此，我们选择研究受教育程度相当的年轻和老年成人组在包括听觉和视觉数字广度、反向任务、基于韦氏成人智力量表（WAIS）的处理速度测量（即符号搜索[SS]和编码[Cod]）等经典记忆任务上的表现，以及一项关注回顾性时间估计的WM时间测量任务。我们的样本包括66名年龄在18 - 29岁之间的大学生（58名女性，8名男性），以及33名年龄在60 - 81岁之间受过大学教育的健康老年人（25名女性，8名男性）。结果表明，老年人在听觉数字广度任务上表现明显较差，但在视觉数字广度任务上没有，在SS和Cod任务上也表现较差，不过在1-back任务上表现相当。结果还表明，年轻和老年成年人在回顾性时间估计上没有显著差异，两组都大幅低估了一个简单任务的持续时间。回顾性时间估计与任何记忆或处理速度测量都没有显著相关性，这强调了未来需要对主观估计时间间隔背后的特定认知领域进行研究。
